Winter has been progressing along very nicely so far for us and the anticipation of a good spring is in the air. All the lambs are on the ground and there is a great stretch in the day, albeit disturbed this past week by a few dirty days.

With nearly 250 ewes lambed at this stage, we have great space in the sheds to buy in some more cattle or divide up cattle for finishing in the shed. We could even let some out to grass again, which has been progressing as good as I can remember for long time - losses on the lamb front have been minimal.

Two lambs over a week-old died from a lack of milk and one lamb was, we presume, taken by the fox as there has been no sight of him since.

ICBF and letting cattle off slats

With this in mind, last week we borrowed a good friend’s weighing scales. We also use ICBF to weigh when we have a lot to do as they provide a great service and a full online report of weight gains or slaughter analysis.

They really provide an excellent service and I would encourage farmers to avail of it.

It’s always a cautious moment letting cattle off slats; they have been penned up since 28 November and they didn’t let us down this time either.

They kicked and bucked but after a minute or two we had them in the handling area.

These heifers were last weighed on 31 October and they have put on 60kg on good silage. There were only two exceptions to this that just put on 20kg. Most of the heifers now weigh between 500 – 530kg.

It’s always great to have an accurate figure on their weights; it just eliminates the guesswork.

We dosed the lighter ones as they will probably go back to grass but the heaviest ones are on straw and will be pushed on to finishing.

We killed some of the heaviest ones, as, in the words of my dad, “there is very little alteration left in them ladies.”

They weighed 300kgs DW which we were delighted with.

Safe footwear

On another note, with all the talk of health and safety it surprises me how many farmers still don’t wear steel toe Wellingtons boots as they go about their daily routine. Recently, a man in the local area broke his toe from a falling iron bar he was carrying which dropped on his foot. When I asked him if he was wearing safety boots he smiled at me.

As at foot specialist said to me once at a wedding, if you spend €100 or €200 on a pair of fancy shoes to wear once a week to mass, why wouldn’t you buy the best boots you could to wear 24/7 as you go about your work?

He said that 90% of people’s hip, knee and back pain come from improper footwear. So there’s a good excuse to go shopping.