It is turning into another typical Scottish summer in southwest Scotland. We are fortunate that our land is fairly hard and free-draining, so we don’t suffer too badly from the wet weather, but it is taking its toll on stock and the fettle of the farmers.

We were able to get our silage and haylage in during good conditions at the start of July, due to a bit of luck and a great service from our contractors.

We have one field left to get a second cut of bales from for the ewes, and that will be us tidied up.

We decided to wean lambs earlier this year, to free up better-quality grass for the lambs and to try to improve growth rates. We averaged just over 30kg at 110 days old, which I was fairly happy with, but as it is our first year weighing everything at weaning, we don’t have any historical data to compare.

I am delighted with how the lambs have progressed since weaning and think we should be weaning earlier still, at around 100 days.

We would normally dose all the lambs with a clear wormer at weaning, but we dung-sampled this year and found them to be clear, so didn’t dose any lambs at all. We will monitor growth rates and FEC going forward.

Our Te-Pari handling system is really coming into its own now, allowing us to weigh and draft lambs into groups automatically, which is saving time and allowing us to target different quality grass to specific weight ranges of lambs.

I was also surprised with the range of weights of our ewes and it really does help focus the mind on what type of sheep we should be aiming to breed.

Unfortunately, it is taking me a wee while to get used to the new clamp, which has resulted in a few mishaps and torn tendons in my hand.

Fat lambs have been quicker to finish this year and we are ahead of where we were this time last year in terms of price and numbers sold; this is partly due to creep-feeding early lambs, but also down to weaning earlier and better management of grass.

We have decided to sell some store lambs again this year, to take the pressure off a bit and ensure we have enough grass for the winter.

We were really pleased with our first store lambs, which we sold at Castle Douglas on Saturday; they were nice Beltex lambs and were keenly bid to an average of £57.

Aileen and I hosted a farm visit this morning for a group of Icelandic farmers. I always really enjoy meeting groups of farmers from other parts of the globe and find I get a fair bit out of answering their questions and comparing systems. It does you a lot of good to have someone with a fresh pair of eyes to come onto the farm and question why you do things the way you do.

It was also comforting to hear that although their beef price and subsidies are much higher than ours, their sheep industry suffers many of the same issues as ours, and straw is double the price it is here.