Spring may have made a showing across the rest of the country, but things are still cold in Caithness. Northerly winds have been keeping temperatures down – with grass growth really slowed up for April, after a promising March. That being said, May is getting warmer, we have most of the cattle out and grass growth is starting to pick up now.

Our spring-calving herd of 90 cows were very slow to start calving in early March, but by mid-March things got going and by the end of April there were only five cows still to calve. They will join the summer calvers.

Unfortunately, things don’t always run smoothly and we have lost one cow to an infection post-caesarean, one has slipped her calf and we have also lost four other calves. However, the calf losses have been offset by a few sets of twins and all-in-all we have 83 spring cows with 84 calves at foot.

Summer calvers began in the first week of May and so far we’ve had 10 cows calve with all doing well. We keep the bulk of the cows up on the hill; a couple of times a week we go up and pick out those closest to calving and move them to a field just across the road from the farm, to let us keep a closer eye on them.

Grazing

This year, I am having a go at rotational grazing and have split two fields across from my house into three 3.5-hectare sections. The original plan had been to stock this with 25 cows and their calves, but conditions weren’t great for turnout, so grass is a bit further ahead than I would like it to be. To manage this, we are going to add another 10 cows and calves to the group and see if that gets enough pressure to get on top of the grass. If not, I will silage one of the paddocks and keep the cows across the other two – with another field in reserve if regrowth is slow.

Our silage fields are in a mown grassland environmental scheme, with grazing stopping on 1 April, no fertiliser applied until after 15 May and we cannot cut it until 1 July. In the past, this has made it difficult to make good-quality silage. This year, we have approached things differently to try and make the best quality silage we can without jeopardising the scheme. Ewe lambs that were wintering with us were put across the silage ground and grazed it hard right up until the closing date. This has held growth back and between the colder conditions since then and geese, there has been little growth. Next week we will get on with the silage fertiliser, with a total nitrogen application of 105kg/ha. At 2.5kg/day of uptake, that should see the nitrogen all used in time for cutting in the first days of July. The fields that are needing lime will get done after the silage is off and I will also apply slurry across the aftermaths.

Rushing into trouble

We have a bit of trouble with rushes on the farm and are looking at getting them under control. A series of wet years has really exacerbated the problem, but with what looks to be a drier year coming up, we think we will tackle some bits of reseeding to get them freshened up. So far, I have a five-hectare area sprayed off and have a further five-hectare field to do. These will be ploughed and sown back to grass.

This will give us a few more acres of good grazing for next year and will help to drive our output from grazing.