The Gammies farm in a family partnership at Drumforber Farm, Laurencekirk, in the Howe of the Mearns. It is very much an arable farm, with much of the land Macaulay Class 2. However, the area of the farm in grass is progressively expanding at the expense of arable, as the family prefers cattle and can see a better income from livestock compared with growing cereals for the current market. Around a third of the farm is in grass, with the rest in cereals and potatoes.

The expanding herd of commercial cows is made up of Limousin-cross and Aberdeen Angus-cross cows. Alongside this, there is a pedigree Limousin cattle under the Westpit prefix. Calves not retained for breeding or pedigree sale are sold in a variety of ways, from store through to fat.

In total, there are 80 cows and the plan is to increase numbers over the next few years. However, trying to do this from within the herd is a slow process.

Farm plan

One of the key things in the programme will be maximising the output from grass. In the plan, some fields for subdivision were identified to improve the utilisation of grazed grass. Alongside this, the plan is to improve the feed value in the silage to reduce the amount of purchased feed used.

Andrew Gammie’s view

Grass has continued to grow, with favourable conditions keeping it going. After the tremendous growth earlier in the season giving us extra silage in the first cut, we now have the lucky problem of what to do with all of the extra grass that we have. Winter forage requirements are already met from first cut and the move to ammonia straw for the dry cows.

The use of ammonia-treated straw makes sense for our dry springcalving cows. This will mean there is no need to dilute our high-quality first-cut silage with straw for the dry cows as they will spend most of winter on treated straw.

Around one month to six weeks pre-calving, they will move on to a 50:50 silage and ammonia straw diet to make sure that when the calves hit the ground, there is good-quality colostrum in their mothers.

This will be useful for us in a few ways, including simplifying winter feeding and reducing the amount of silage required.

With the reduction in silage required, this has left us with a conundrum of what to do with the grass that is still available. I have turned one silage over to grazing, leaving a 10ha silage field spare.

After a bit of thought, I am going to cut it for hay next week, weather permitting, as having the pedigree bulls and different cow breeding programmes, it is useful for us to have for any animals that need to be in for a couple of days, without needing to open a silage bale and accept the wastage that we’ll get.

Fertility wise, the farm is in good order, with us having invested well over the years to maintain pH, phosphate and potash status across the farm. The only concern from the soil samples that were taken recently is the high magnesium levels across the farm.

This has come from a history of applying magnesium lime. The soil type across the whole farm is clay and can be a challenge anyway at some points in the year.

High magnesium levels do not help with this at all as magnesium levels out of balance encourage the soil to stick together more tightly. The current liming plan calls for calcium lime to be used until the magnesium level falls back to a more moderate level.

To speed the reduction in magnesium levels, we have tried spreading some gypsum spread across 25 ha. The idea behind this is that the sulphur in the gypsum binds to the magnesium in the soil and the resulting magnesium sulphate is more mobile. It is then leached lower in the soil profile and the remaining calcium from the gypsum remains to help free the soil.

Alongside the gypsum, compaction in the grass fields was also thought to be an issue.

Back in February, we walked the grassland with a spade and dug a number of holes to investigate what was happening below the surface.

Initially, we thought that the compaction was down quite deep and that a subsoiler would be the best option. However, the bulk of the compaction was found to exist only in the top 5cm to 10cm of the soil.

We tried an Alstrong aerator across some of the ground and subsequently purchased it. All of the grassland has now had a run with it. One field in particular was quite mossy and had a history of giving one good grazing in May/June and then running out of steam quite quickly after that.

This year, after gypsum, aeration and rotational grazing, it is holding its’ own and looks healthier than it has in a long time. Bulls are out and working with their groups now. One of the issues identified early in the project was the calving pattern. Due to the initial rapid expansion of the herd from a low base, calving pattern was fairly protracted with the spread from first calf to last calf being 10 months.

This is quite trying and, to make management easier, we decided to fit the cows in to two groups, with the commercial cows all calving in the spring and the pedigree cows all calving in the autumn.

This has meant some cows being held back from the bull for around three months and some falling naturally in to place. Over the life of the project, I am targeting getting calving down to two compact 10 week blocks. To simplify management further, I could close calving down to one 10 week period. However, the pedigrees are better suited to calving in the autumn to match bull sale dates and I would prefer to calve the rest in the spring.