"We've picked up a good pace." Farms in the Svisloch district are mowing perennial grasses for the first time

15 May, Svisloch District. The first mowing of perennial grasses is being carried out by farms in the Grodno Region, a BELTA correspondent reports.   

All farms in the Svisloch District without exception are involved in forage harvesting, including OAO Ak-Agro. Two forage harvesters, two rakes are working in the fields of the agricultural enterprise, six units of equipment are used to transport haylage, and three more are used for compaction.

"We started harvesting haylage this year two weeks earlier than last year. We have already laid 1.5 thousand tons of haylage from green rye. Now we have started the first mowing of perennial grasses. At this stage, we are harvesting haylage from pure alfalfa, we are laying it down for the second day - we have laid down more than 1 thousand tons. According to data for this morning, we have mowed 25% of the area for the first mowing. Our target for haylage is 9 thousand tons. And we have already prepared about 28%. The situation is still not bad. We have picked up a good pace," said Yevgeny Dudak,       DIRECTOR
of OJSC "Akr-Agro". By the way, the farm has very little time left (literally a couple of days) to finish sowing corn. "We have harvested areas with green rye for green fodder and are immediately sowing corn. So, we will have everything completed in terms of sowing. By the way, spring sowing on our farm is very large - 3 thousand hectares: this includes corn, barley,peas , soybeans, buckwheat, sunflower," added the HEAD of the farm.  

According to him, protein crops are treated with special attention here. "This year we sowed soybeans, we have already weeded them. We hope to get a good soybean harvest. We need protein. We have quite good results in MILK. We have 1,425 heads of dairy cattle and almost 4 thousand in total cattle on the farm," noted Evgeny Dudak. By the way, the farm is looking to the future. They plan to build two more trenches for storing feed. The  
farm workers also realize the importance of the next stage in the agricultural calendar. "We are working in a cheerful mood. We need to work, we need to prepare feed for the cattle, while observing all the important points so that it is of good quality. "And the weather and nature are trying to help us," shared his thoughts machine operator Vladimir Grigolets, who took a short break from working in the field.  

As the first deputy chairman of the Svisloch District Executive Committee Andrei Gritskevich said, in general, the district plans to prepare about 60% of the required amount of haylage from the first cut of grasses. "Perennial grasses are being mown, haylage is being prepared, the weather is favorable, the crops are in the necessary phases, so people are actively working in the fields, regardless of time, to prepare full-fledged high-quality feed. The frosts that happened last week knocked us down a little. If we talk about legumes, the mass has grown quite well, but as for cereals, it is clear that they have sagged, frozen. In the future, when we collect the first cut, we will simultaneously carry out work with overseeding of intermediate crops. We already see that this is necessary to compensate for the shortfall in cereal grasses. In our district, cereal grasses account for 40% of the perennial structure. Therefore, we will plow low-yielding fields and re-sow with intermediate crops to obtain the required amount of feed," he said.
This week, in the Svisloch district, they plan to complete the sowing of corn for silage - slightly less than 2 thousand hectares remain. All other work in the district's farms has been completed. Re-grassing is also actively underway, and alfalfa is being sown in the district. In this way, they are creating a reserve for the following years for forage harvesting.
Photo by Leonid Shcheglov