A Touch of Grass is the somewhat weighty, but fascinating account of Alan Kyle’s life.
A pioneering farmer born in 1937 in Northern Ireland, he has drawn the words from diaries he wrote from 1952 until retirement in 1999, and includes hundreds of photos of the farms, animals, machines and people through the ages – on this side of the world and in New Zealand too.
From small beginnings, with ten cows in a byre, horses used for most fieldwork and feeding hay, the family business has expanded to hundreds of cows, kept very much on a milk from grazed grass basis.
Alan was one of the first to try making silage in the 1950’s, before plastic sheeting came in to cover the freshly cut grass. The only way to do this then was with a very thick layer of farmyard manure! Once plastic came in, keeping it in place was the next problem, but Alan soon found an answer. He was one of the first farmers to use old car tyres – something that carries on across the UK today.
Alan’s exceptional silage making was recognised in 1981, when he was the winner of the prestigious British Grassland Society Silage Competition, beating more than 1,100 entries.
In 1994, Alan and his wife Agnes set off for a first trip to see the low-cost, high profit, grass-based milk production in New Zealand. They saw and learnt – as I and many others who have traveled there, how the sudden removal of subsidies created a dairy industry which had to drive down costs and do things simply – producing milk from grass efficiently.
“If you want to sell more milk from your farm, it is more profitable for increase stocking rates and keep more cows, rather than increase yield per cow. Extra cows do not make much extra work. It is easier to milk a few more cows than race around the yard all day with a feed wagon,” says Alan on page 281.
In 2005, the family bought a farm in New Zealand, which was run by eldest son Kenneth. On semi-retirement, their other son Michael took over the home farm in Northern Ireland and put a New Zealand style system in place, increasing the herd to 340 cows. But he was running out of space.
While travelling on a Nuffield Scholarship (he was in the same cohort as me!) he and his wife Lorrie, bought a farm in the great grass-growing area across the Irish Sea near Dumfries.
I visited the farm in 2010, on a damp February day. The cows were out and despite the wet, we got down onto our hands and knees to see that the grass was growing again – a day after the cows had left it. The wonder of grass!
Alan and Michael have transformed the farm, putting in an 80-unit rotary parlour in the centre of the farm, ‘open top’ cubicles for 600 cows and setting up the infrastructure to graze the large herd of spring calving cows. They have also lined some of the cow tracks with Astroturf, which has reduced foot problems significantly.
Their aim is to produce all milk from grazed grass, only supplementing the cows if grass is scarce, and then only with a minimal amount of concentrates and silage.
The total emphasis is on efficient grass utilisation through rotational paddock grazing. They have spent a lot to set the farm up, but the returns are being maximised too.
A Touch of Grass offers a perfect slice of family farming life, from one of the most forward thinking farming families of our time.
I have seen one or two copies on my visits to other grassland farmers around the country – it is an ideal dip in/dip out kind of read!
One thousand copies were printed, and there may not be many, if any, left. Call Alison at the Carlisle Bookshop to see. It costs £20 and is worth every penny.