In a previous life, I worked as an eLearning training officer in a third-level organisation.

In plain English, that means I showed teaching staff how to use different types of technology that could help them deliver more engaging lectures to students.

A phrase from that time still comes to mind now and then, especially as we start to implement a plan that only existed on paper previously.

In those training days, you would ask yourself ‘is there enough room here for unintended learning outcomes?’

That is, will people come to learn one thing, but is there space for them to learn something else as well?

While this was seen as a good thing in eLearning, it might not be so welcome in farming, where the room for unintended consequences could wipe out any projected profit.

New plan

Our new plan is to house the ewes for two months from mid-December to mid-February and lamb them down a month earlier than we did in 2017, moving from 1 February to 1 March.

We’ve got a new terminal ram too and, if all goes to plan, we’ll be selling 43kg to 45kg lambs by mid-June 2018.

Suffice to say, there’s plenty of room for unintended consequences and learning outcomes in this plan.

The first issue is housing.

Will the ewes settle OK? Will lameness be a problem? Will our feed plan be sufficient? Have we got enough individual lambing pens?

Then there’s the weather.

What if it’s snowing or there’s heavy rain in the weeks before ewe and lamb turnout? Will the tight wool of our terminal ram mean higher lamb mortality?

Labour could also be a banana skin.

What will we do if housing and earlier lambing turns out to be more labour-intensive than we’ve accounted for?

And all of the above must be considered before even contemplating the price of lambs in June/July of 2018.

The Muslim festival of Ramadan ends on 14 June next year, so we might get a few of the earliest lambs away in time for that. The other Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha is 22 August.

Perhaps it would be easier not to push lambs with creep and aim for that?

Stay in bed

The more you think about something, the more possibilities and questions come to mind. However, you can’t live like that or you’d never get out of bed in the morning.

In reality, we have contingencies in place for most of the above issues and we should be OK for the known unknowns.

The bigger question is how do you plan for the unknown unknowns, to use that famous phrase.

Again, you can’t. You have to resign yourself to the fact that the world is much more random that we think it is. It’s a law of nature that there will be always be room for unintended learning outcomes.

Kieran Sullivan and his brother farm part-time in Co Waterford. You can follow him on Twitter: @kieran_sullivan

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