Looking After Crops

Lots of different crops are grown on the farm but the four main groups grown on British farms are:

Click on each of the four groups above to discover details of the crops and the way we farm them.

Forages

These include grass, maize, clover and other ‘green’ crops.

Grass like plants are among the most versatile life forms and have adapted to conditions in lush rain forests, dry deserts and cold mountain steppes and are now the most widespread plant type. Plants of this type have always been important to humans. They have been cultivated as food for domesticated animals for up to 10,000 years. They have been used for paper-making since at least 2400 BC and now they provide the majority of food crops and have many other uses such as feeding animals.

Many types of animals eat grass as their main source of food. These animals are usually called "herbivores", although certain herbivores are more inclined to eat leafy plants, and some omnivorous or even primarily carnivorous animals have been observed eating grass sometimes. Some of the most familiar grass eaters include cows, sheep, horses and rabbits.

Grass is used to feed livestock either fresh with the animals eating in the field or preserved as silage or hay. Both silage and hay is harvested when there is a flush of growth in the spring and early summer and there is too much grass for the stock to eat. The grass is harvested and either ensiled as a moist feed – silage, or dried and stored undercover as a dry feed – hay. Both types of forage provide nutritious feeds for the following winter for all kinds of farm livestock.

Maize is a domesticated form of a wild grass first cultivated over 5,000 years ago in tropical Mexico that produces an adaptable and productive grain. It was introduced to the UK in the early part of the twentieth century and is grown mainly as a feed for cattle.
Today the bulk of maize production occurs in the US, China and Brazil. In the more northerly climates like the UK where there is insufficient summer warmth to ripen the crop maize is grown largely for forage. Here it has become an important crop being the most important forage after grass with around 100,000 hectares grown annually mainly in the south of the country. Nearly all of it is ensiled to produce a quality, high-energy silage that complements grass silage for the winter feeding of livestock.

Forage maize is relatively easy to grow and being drought tolerant is a consistent provider of high yields with minimum input from the farmer. From a practical point of view, forage maize also spreads the silage making season – maize is ensiled in September or October, long after most grass silage making has finished.

Clover is a legume which means it produces its own nitrogen to feed itself. There are many different species of clover but to an untrained eye there are two main types you can see growing in fields, red clover and white clover. The easy way to identify these if it is the right time of year (summer) is to see what colour flowers they have. Clover is usually planted as a part of a seed mix with other types of grass and either grazed in the field by stock, ensiled as silage or made into nice sweet hay.