I have never seen fertiliser just sitting on the ground for so long – the rain, even though it was cold, was welcome but not enough.

I had hoped that it would get washed in and begin to get nitrogen to the crops, especially the wheat.

We are also waiting to see real growth in the silage ground – it has all had a grazing to remove the winter growth, some we have zero-grazed and brought into the bulls and some we have grazed with the young stock. It is noticeable that the new swards have recovered much more quickly than the old pasture.

We haven’t that much old pasture that we keep for silage but I am struck by just how much weed infestation there is in a sward that’s about eight years old.

We may have to reseed it again this autumn. It is a reclaimed field that we put a complete drainage system into a number of years ago but the soil structure is fragile so I would be reluctant to attempt to take a crop so it will be net money out for any reseeding we do.

We had a full crop walk during the week and were surprised at the level of oat infestation in one biggish field of winter barley.

I cannot blame my normal oat crop. The field has never had oats grown in it and the field itself is only in tillage for the last five years.

The fact that we all agreed that the contaminating oat plants seem to be along the rows of the actual crop would suggest at least a possibility of a problem with the seed.

While we will try and sort out what went wrong, we will in the meantime apply a herbicide to take out the offending oat plants. At this stage I am not quite sure whether they are a wild or cultivated oat.

Bulls

Meanwhile, we did some weighing of the bulls we are aiming to have finished around 1 July. They are pretty well on full feed but I am diluting the normal 100% concentrate diet with some zero-grazed grass.

We seem to be getting a liveweight gain of about 1.5kg/day so we should be on target to meet the specifications on age, weight and fat cover.