COLLECTING FEED POTATOES, POTATO SHORTAGE AND FEEDING BEET VS POTATOES OVERVIEW.

morning everyone hope you're all well it is a lovely frosty morning here it's one of those mornings where it's nice and sunny uh quite cold slippery on the foot but it's nice morning to be out and doing something anything is better than the rain this time of year i think we're going to get a prolonged a cold snap like this over the next number of days right after after the weekend possibly even some snow later in the week so you never know we'll see what way that works out and today's video we're gonna go and collect some feed potatoes now uh we did get quite a quite a bit of feed potatoes a bit a week or week and a half before christmas and hey we've got 27 ton delivered lorry load and then we had a tractor load as well and this is all that's left about there's about four ton though not even so we need to get stocks built back up again and we're using roughly around 15 ton a week so we're getting through the potatoes rightly now at this stage and keep in stock of them is the issue but we'll go into that a on the drive up maybe just why it's so hard to keep stuck with them at the minute um yeah first before we hook on the trailer and check the tire pressures i'm going to pull the tractor off and give it a wash the last few runs that have done well for me is meal and anyone that's ever collected me as meal knows that the dust just gets everywhere so we'll give the hose down a quick bit of a sponge just freshen it up however that we can see at the windows and there's nice sunny weather and uh yeah we took on the trailer so probably the next next bit of footage will be time lapsed washed under the tractor and then you can come back to me then when we're hooking on the trailer [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] um so so [Music] so [Music] okay so we are on route back home we're running out of daylight a little bit but i put on the light here on the tractor so i think you should be just about able to see me um yeah on route back home from the meat potato company and so quite a few years i've been up there for a load of potatoes and i kind of forgot just how nice the entrance and driveway was up to where where the processing plant is uh lovely driveway and like a double road right up to it and very it's if you're a really nice large farm it's the kind of roadway you'd love to have up through the middle of us um but yeah a little bit far for collecting feed potatoes it's uh roughly about 35 kilometers from home and we don't usually have to go that far but their supply chain and we were feeding feed potatoes for roughly i'd say 30 years and we've always we've built up a fairly good supply chain over the years and we've always been able to keep a good supply of potatoes coming at all times but we're finding it it is a little bit harder over the past few years uh just to keep the gold especially in the last 12 to 18 months the reason for that is now that they have the the larger processing plants uh have now built their like digesters and things like this and they use those feed potatoes up and the way it has always worked is uh farmers take their own potatoes some grate them and bag them and sell them all to the shops themselves others then if they have a large amount of potatoes they may do some of that but they'll also sell maybe a certain amount of tonnage away to a large uh processing potato plant and they'll then bag them and they'll send them with supermarkets or whatnot and then whatever rubber spots feed spots that there is the farmer usually got them back but they have stopped in that the fact that they've started up these digesters and they're giving the farmer some money for those potatoes they keep them and they're sent on them to these digesters so air feed category potatoes are now going to digesters that's basically what's happening um and okay i can see the point of it they want to use up the potatoes in whatever way that they can that will make money for them and that's the way it works out but yeah as i said if we feed potatoes 30 years and we feed them over bees because bees and potatoes have roughly the same feed value potatoes usually are a bit cheaper to feed and the only downside feeding potatoes over base there's a couple of that's actually downsides to it one is that potatoes usually aren't washed uh so you always have some extra stones and clay that comes in on them and then you end up beating that which can cause a little bit of issues and one meaning that the stones are blocking the knives in your diet feed up to meet this and clay if ingested by the cattle if there's enough cleaners it can cause scour and cause issues that way so uh that's one downside the other inside then is this uh it's never really an issue for us because we are feeding both a lot of the time over the last years but when feeding potatoes to bollocks or heifers potatoes tend to at the end uh tend to put the the bulk or half of over fat uh so that can cause issues then when you send your cattle to the factory and they are too high your fats go under your cotton price so uh beet when fed in them last month or a couple of months that doesn't happen so much so and what we're going to do is now the fact that we're not able to get as much potatoes or not able to supply them anyway and the fact that now we aren't feeding this many balls that we've moved on now to heifers and bollocks we're going to we're going to start introducing meat probably from this weekend into the into the feed we've got the david brown on the beach up or we'll get it set up on the weekend and we'll start we start chopping beat and adding it into the ration so yeah it does me it's an extra little bit to do when you're feeding the cattle but it's not the end of the war once it's set up you should be able to chop enough beef maybe that every second day that would that would do so so yeah that's kind of the way it is with the potatoes at the minute we're still able to get them just about but we will be if we wanted to feed 100 potatoes and no beef uh i don't think we'd be able to get enough of them anywhere potatoes so uh yeah bottom line is we're moving over to bees as as part of our root crop um but yeah so we're gonna just try and get back home now roads are places never thought out today the roads are quite slippy in places so i'm not hammering home just take my time and yeah get back home we'll get these potatoes tipped out uh and we'll we'll see see how they look when they're tipped out on the ground and the another another job done for [Music] strippy so [Music] okay so potatoes are tipped uh we've enough now probably enough potatoes here now for roughly about nine days so not too bad we have another load of potatoes that we have to collect next week uh also as i said we're going to be getting ready now for receiving the beet so the bottom side is right here beside me that has to get cleared here there's some trailers packing the way we're going to move the chopper in there we're going to get everything ready for receiving the beat at the weekend so that'll be the next video more or less um and that's really it for today's video i suppose uh i don't know if you've seen some of the people i nominated have done the the bail challenge uh farming life at la forge has done it i believe next falm is going to have it up this evening i think i do i agree if they're going to have it up in the next year so no sign of grassmann doing it yet so if you follow grassmann don't forget to throw plenty of comments there and try and get donkey try and push donkey into doing it uh yeah but that's really yes don't forget if you're not already a subscriber to hit the sub button to leave a like on the video comment down below all that kind of stuff all helps to push the channel on so it's all very much appreciated if you can do that as always thank you very much for watching we will see you in the next few days with the next video take care

Channel: gerry6420

Views: 14,452

Rating: 4.9777036 out of 5

Keywords: Tractor, John deere, Telehandler, Farm, Beef, Cattle, Jcb, Potatoes, Silage, Slurry

Id: H8fUn3-v4ds

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021