The muggy weather saw a few snotty noses and bouts of coughing among some of the weanlings and myself. This provided a test for the pneumonia vaccines and they seem to have come through it. Vaccines are a super form of insurance and, while an added cost, they provide protection from disease and peace of mind during a busy calving season.

Between now and calving, cows will receive three different vaccines – BVD, pneumonia and rotavirus. The latter two vaccines are required to pass on immunity to the calf, so are required close to calving.

I have no issue putting cows through the crush at any time – I know I never want an outbreak of rotavirus again. That’s soul destroying to deal with.

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It requires careful handling and no rushing of cows. The benefits of focusing on culling out excitable cows makes crush work much safer and smoother.

I took dung samples of the cows and heifers last week and the cows were negative for everything except rumen fluke, while the heifers had low levels of lung worm.

I’ll have a chat with the vets before deciding what to do. I’d imagine it will be a case of dosing the cows with a product to hit rumen fluke only. On the heifers, as lung worm presence was minuscule, it might be suggested to leave all alone until summer.

I want to avoid resistance to drenches building up.

Disease prevention and reducing unnecessary treatments has been the mainstay of the herd health plan here over the last number of years and the plan for 2017 will be put in place shortly.

I was asked recently to talk of my experiences of Bord Bia audits and I spoke about how fear was my initial feeling for the first ones, but I now have a much more relaxed attitude as I know what to expect.

In preparation for these, I did a bit of research to see what financial benefit, if any, the Bord Bia quality bonus was worth to the farm. For 2016, it bought in €1,688 or €26/cow.

The Bord bia levy paid at €1.90/animal cost me close to €120.

So it was the value of selling over one extra animal. There was potential for this to be over €30/cow, but not all animals hit the required fat specifications with a tighter window for cows. That’s something to work on for 2017.

The two stock bulls, together with three weanling pedigree bulls, are in a steep piece of ground with some of it cleared in grass and the rest scrub – an au naturel winter playground for them, with silage and a mineral bucket their only supplement.

It will be interesting to compare their weights from April with their comrades who are in for finishing. I had a few calls from farmers looking for bulls last spring, but only had one that I wasn’t able to retain, so I finished him.

By the time the calls came in early April, it wasn’t worth taking him out on a chance that a buyer might take him when he was less than a month from slaughter.

We have had pedigree cattle since 1999, growing the herd organically and trying to replicate commercial reality with a focus on functionality and ability to utilise grass.

Put simply, the cows work for us, instead of us working for the cows.

The environment in which we, as pedigree breeders produce our product, needs to be similar to the environment in which our product will be asked to function.