Abstract
Grassland silage management is generally semi-organised with no conscious attempt to re-use wheel ways as with arable fields. The total number of machine passes can be 15 or more with normal traffic (NT) systems resulting in potentially large areas of a field suffering from direct damage to the crop and soil. Literature suggests there can be grass dry matter yield reductions of 5 to 74% under NT through compaction and sward damage, with a mean of 13% in the UK. Commercially available grass forage equipment with widths of 3 to 12 m set up for controlled traffic farming (CTF) could reduce trafficked areas (which is typically 90% to 80% for NT) to 40% to 13% for CTF. This study compared grass dry matter yield between CTF and NT for a three-cut silage system based on a 9 m working width in a permanent silage field in the southwest of Scotland, UK in 2015. Results showed a 13.5% (0.80 t ha−1) increase in yield for CTF for the 2nd and 3rd cuts combined. The CTF trafficked area covered was 57% less than the NT system (30.4% compared to 87.4%) over the three silage cuts. An economic analysis based on a 13% increase in dry matter yield (for 2- and 3-cut systems) and a reduction in trafficked area from 80% (for NT) to between 45% and 15% (for CTF), increased the yield by between 0.53 t ha−1 and 1.36 t ha−1 for 2- and 3-cut systems, respectively with an equivalent grass value of between £38 ha−1 and £98 ha−1. Introducing CTF for a multi-cut grass silage system is cost-effective by increasing yields due to a reduction in compaction and sward damage.
Highlights
Grassland silage management is generally conducted with no conscious attempt to re-use wheel ways as often happens with arable fields
The objectives of this work were to: (i) use a 9 m wide controlled traffic farming (CTF) system for one season of three silage cuts in a silage field in the southwest of Scotland, UK to assess the potential increase in grass DM yield and (ii) use the values derived to determine the economic value of implementing a CTF system for grass production
The within-field variation was similar for the pH with a CV% of 4.6 for CTF and CV% of 4.8 for normal traffic (NT), with mean pH values for the NT and CTF fields of 6.47 and 6.42, respectively
Summary
Grassland silage management is generally conducted with no conscious attempt to re-use wheel ways as often happens with arable fields. Traffic can cause damage to the sward (Volden et al 2002) through soil compaction with increases in bulk density and shear strength, together with reductions in porosity (Douglas et al 1992) and reduced air and water permeability (Batey 2009; Chyba et al 2014). As soil moisture increases towards field capacity, the more susceptible it is to compaction (Alaoui et al 2018). Thirtyyear average data (1981 to 2010) for the UK weather patterns show the greater rainfall at the start and the end of the year (Table 1), with March having greater rainfall than February. In years with average weather patterns, soil/ crop damage will more commonly occur as a result of operations during the wetter spring or autumn months
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