Warning: High Levels of Ergot Detected in Cereal Crops

As the harvest season is upon us, we want to bring an urgent issue to your attention. This year, a number of cereal crops across our region are showing unusually high levels of Ergot, a fungal infection which can pose significant risks to livestock.

What is Ergot?

Ergot is a fungus that infects cereal grains like rye, wheat, and barley. It forms hard, dark sclerotia in place of the grain kernels, which contain toxic alkaloids harmful to both animals and humans.

Risks to Livestock

Cattle, sheep, and goats are especially susceptible to Ergot poisoning. Ingesting contaminated feed can lead to:

• Circulatory Problems: Ergot alkaloids cause blood vessel constriction, reducing blood flow to extremities and potentially leading to lameness, tissue damage, and in severe cases, gangrene.

• Reproductive Issues: Livestock may experience reduced fertility, miscarriages, and significantly reduce milk yields. 

• Neurological Effects: Symptoms can include nervousness, convulsions, and even death in severe cases.

Safe Levels of Ergot in Diets

Ergot is highly toxic, so we would not recommend feeding any contaminated grain to livestock.  Some research has shown that an Ergot concentration of 0.2 ppm (equivalent to 0.0002g/kg) in the overall diet can be enough to cause significant symptoms.  Therefore, if a cow eating 50kg fresh weight per day, just 0.01g of Ergot in the mix is enough to cause an issue. 

Mycotoxin binders will not help with Ergot unfortunately. 

Recommended Actions

• Inspect and Test: Regularly inspect your grain for visible Ergot sclerotia. If in doubt, please let us know and we can arrange testing for you.  Some images of Ergot are shown below to help you identify it. 

• Clean:  A good grain cleaner will separate good grain from Ergot, it's lighter than grain so quite easily separated.   It must go through the cleaner slowly to be effective. 

• Discard or Dilute: If contamination is present, consider discarding the affected grain.  It is possible to dilute it with clean grain, but careful calculations will be needed. 

  
  

If you have any concerns at all, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. 

New Director Appointments at Kelly Farm Consulting

We are thrilled to announce the promotion of three incredible team members to Directors: Beth Woodland, Charlie Davies, and Katie Lloyd!

These promotions reflect our confidence in Beth, Charlie, and Katie's ability to lead our company into the future. We will shortly be moving to larger premises, and will be expanding the team further later on in the autumn.   

Please join us in congratulating Beth, Charlie, and Katie on their well-deserved promotions!

1st Cut Silage Quality

You wouldn’t be blamed for not wanting to re-live this year’s spring, with the Met Office recording its sixth-wettest period during March, April and May at 32% more rainfall than average.  The preceding winter wasn’t any better, and this combined with the lack of sunshine this spring has led to bumper crops of low quality 1st cut silage. 

Typically, we are seeing that both ME and protein are very disappointing on 1st cut samples analysed so far.  This is partly due to late harvesting, but the low proteins are a result of the wet winter and the grass not getting its roots down to find the nitrogen.  Early fertiliser and slurry applications were missed due to the weather on a lot of farms which has also contributed to the lower proteins. 

On average, 1st cut ME this year is 10.5, against 11.07 last year.  If a cow ate 22 kg of last year’s silage, then with the higher fibre and lower energy in this year’s silage, she would only eat 20 kg of this year’s silage, giving a reduction in ME of 13 MJ (double whammy – lower energy and she will eat less of it). That reduction in energy would reduce milk yield by 2.6 litres of milk.  To replace this lost energy with a 12.9 ME concentrate at £280 per tonne would need 1.2 kg costing 33p/cow/day.  For a herd of 200 cows, that equates to £66 per day in extra feed cost to maintain yield.

The good news is later cuts should be much better quality which will help the overall picture, but careful planning is going to be required for this year to maintain yields at a sensible feed cost.