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The 164ha mixed farm has 105ha of grass, with the remainder down to swedes and winter and spring barley, grown for feeding to the stock.
The farm carries a herd of 150 suckler cows and 240 ewes. Most the calves are sold store at around a year old and the majority of the lambs are sold prime.
Stock
Cows are continental crosses and go to Charolais, Simmental and Limousin bulls. The Simmental bull is used to breed replacements, the Limousin for first-calving heifers and the Charolais across the rest.
Calving is split with two-thirds calving in the spring and the remainder in the back end.
Ewes are mainly mules, put back to mainly Texel sires with a couple of Suffolk and Beltex tups also used. Lambing begins late March and fat lambs are sold from late July through in to the spring.
Benchmarking
The livestock benchmarking at North Cranna has been split in to three groups, spring-calving cows, autumn-calving cows and sheep. Currently gross margins are £314/cow for the spring calvers, £293/cow for the autumn calvers and £65/ewe.
1. Calving spread and weaning percentage.
Calving at North Cranna can be protracted. Calving will be tightened to two 12-week periods: spring and autumn. Two things are critical to make sure this happens.
Firstly, bulls will be kept away from cows outside of the two bulling periods.
Secondly, cows will no longer be allowed to slip from group to group. Those that fall outside the calving pattern will be culled. This will mean that those cows that have poorer fertility will be easier to identify and culled.
By tightening this up, rearing percentage will also rise, thanks to the removal of less fertile cows. Lifting the spring rearing percentage to 85%, based on the benchmarked year figures would have seen output per cow raised by £68. At 90%, this would have risen to £118 per cow.
2. Lamb rearing percentage
The benchmarking from the sheep enterprise at North Cranna showed rearing percentage in 2016 to be 126%.
However, this is lower than previous years after a very poor lambing. Previous years are still below the 150% that the programme is targeting for and so a few alterations will be made to the system. Lambed ewes will be rotationally grazed and lambs are to be weaned at 14 weeks old, earlier than they are currently.
This will give ewes more time to recover prior to tupping and allow lamb performance from grass to rise. The lambs will also be grazed on rotation post weaning. This will get them off farm as quickly as possible. Currently, lamb growth rate is around 175gms/day, meaning the average lamb is sold from the farm in November, having eaten seven months of feed.
Pushing growth rates up to 250gms/day will see two months less grass being used for the average lamb. This frees up grazing for sheep in the back end of the year and also frees up some turnips to put the ewes on to closer to lambing.
3. Grassland management
Not only are the Duguids going to rotationally graze the ewes and lambs this year, they are also going to try a batch of cattle as well. Rotational grazing preserves the feed value of the grazed grass and also improves utilisation. Moving from set stocking to rotational grazing means that more of the grass grown is utilised and it makes the best use of the cheapest feed on the farm: the grazed grass.
North Cranna is a heavily stocked farm, running at 3.2 livestock units per on hectare. However, by making the changes above, there is scope to increase this further. The cattle enterprise will struggle to increase by much as there is limited accommodation. The sheep enterprise, on the other hand, would have room to expand and with an increase in gross margin, this would show a serious impact on profitability.
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