Looking to produce more milk from forage? Use our five point checklist to examine your clamp and see what lessons it can reveal to help you boost next season's silage.

The 2022 growing season provided a clear reminder of why it is important to capture and lock-in silage yield and quality at every opportunity.

Prospects of low winter silage stocks – due to poor grass growth during the summer drought and early opening of clamps for buffer feeding – could make it important to employ extra vigilance to safeguard maize silage against losses this year, in order to head off forage shortfalls, says Volac silage expert, Peter Smith.

With soaring feed costs it makes a lot of sense to maximise milk production from home-grown forage, says Volac silage scientist Dr Mark Leggett. Moreover, healthy milk prices add to this argument.

When, like much of the farming community, you live, work and breathe livestock, seeing an animal in distress can be worrying for all. So for UK and Irish dairy farmers in a climate that experiences increasing extremes, heat stress in your cows is a very real and growing concern.

Using technology to produce silage more efficiently and sustainably is paying off both financially and environmentally for one Yorkshire farm.

As any seasoned farmer will confirm, heat stress can be both distressing and costly, so we figured it would be a good time to refresh our memories and put your heat stress knowledge to the test.

How are you looking at the current dairy situation?

For the well-seasoned dairy farmer, it’s no secret that the making of perfect silage takes quite some practice. While in some respects, the principle is less problematic than hay-making - with the UK and Irish climate in mind, every now and then, Mother Nature throws us a little curveball to keep us on our toes.

High fertiliser and feed costs strengthen the argument for making the most of homegrown forage, given decent milk prices. So how do you get the best from silage crops in the second half of the year?