Testimonials and results

“I am a dairy farmer, from Ballythomas, Ardcroney, County Tipperary, who also rears store cattle. We are farming 111 hectares all grass, apart from a small bit of maize and wheat.

We are milking 95 Holstein cows, with a couple of Jerseys as well. The average yield is 10 000 kg at 4 % fat and 3,40 % protein, 780 kg combine solids, mainly Spring calving, all calves are kept, apart from the Jersey bull calves of course. Everything else is reared here in the farm, either for beef or for replacement stock, either that for the female side, or for pedigree bulls.

Basically, the cows are in calf from January up until about March, fed, pretty simple diet. Once we get to the spring it is grass based mostly with a small bit of buffer up until around June when most of the cows would be in calf. The winter diet consists of high dry matter silage and a blend with beet and some straw for fiber. Later on in the year, when they go to grass they are buffered fed with maize.

SOBAC was brought to my attention by a friend of mine, he asked me if I would think about using it, I thought about it for a while, and I enquired around. I was meant to do an awful lot of reseeding, because the pasture had been out for a long long time. So I said, I’ll give it a try.  You can’t take second hand advice; the only way you’ll ever know anything is to try it yourself.

So, this is coming my third year using it. I use Bacteriolit in the slurry and go out with it in January

So far I have been terribly happy with it, there is one set of paddocks over here that’s out 35 years and they have outgrown the freshly grown paddocks. Where it really showed truth to me last year was in the heights of the drought. Where SOBAC had been spread, the grass never died, and that sort of proved to me that the roots had gone down deep enough to access the moisture and the nutrients. Once the rain came, then it took off, definitely outgrew, I would say, probably by 1 ton to the hectare on the newer grass.

Bacteriosol and Bacteriolit were launched in 2012 and I started in 2013. My reservations when I started using it first were that I had very few people that I could actually go to, for an independent view. I have talked to John Bergin who had been using it and John highly recommended it. It is like any new product, you talk to people and they tell you: “oh Jesus! Fools and their money are easily separated”, so I decided that the best way of figuring out anything was to try myself for one year. If I had seen a difference, then I knew I was not taking second hand information. 

There was a big outlay to start off with, the product was expensive, but when you put it over the amount of slurry that it makes, it brings back the costs an awful lot. I have to say that I have been very happy with it. I have had dozens and that’s not an exaggeration, of people coming here, and enquiring from me what I thought about it, was I happy with it, would they use it, would it do the same for them? All I could tell them was my story.

That’s all I can say basically on it, I have been very happy, my grass growth has been good, yields have been up, meal has been slightly back, definitely slightly back this year with the price of milk, but still my average yield is going to hold the same

I am not telling anyone else to use it but if they want to ask about it and want to use it, I will recommend it totally anyway.  I can say no more, only that I have been very happy with the products and I hope to stay using it in the future.”