The winter barley has a washed out, yellow look after recent heavy rain. The pools have reappeared in places where I hoped I wouldn’t see them for the rest of the season and I am anxiously waiting for the oats and wheat sown at the end of the dry spell on 8 February to appear. At this stage, I have no idea if we will get a reasonable germination of the crops or whether some of the seed has rotted in the ground.

Coupled with the incessant rain, the crows are fully active. We are shooting as often as we can but as the days get longer, it’s more difficult to be as vigilant as we would like. We will soon see if they have done real damage. There is no prospect of getting the beans in early this year – my normal aim is St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, but this has varied right up to 30 April which was then followed by the long, hot, dry summer and a halving of the yield.

The crops that have come best through the wet spring are the winter wheat after beans and the oilseed rape. Both are a deep, rich green and even though we have no spring fertiliser out yet, the oilseed rape is showing growth and promise.

On the cattle side, last week we bought our first load of Aberdeen Angus and Hereford-cross Friesian yearling bullocks. They travelled and settled in well and we will graze them for the summer. We will have to buy in some more over the next few weeks and will monitor progress as we go. Their older comrades that we bought in last autumn now weigh little over 500kg. I am resigned to finishing the few that will be 30 months in July out of the shed but my aim is to get a month or six weeks‘ grass into them first. At this stage, we are trying to figure out the practicality of feeding at grass, or bringing them in to finish out of the shed. If they were pure Angus or Hereford, I would have, I reckon, no problem in finishing them off grass on its own but the Holstein Friesian influence is apparent with large intake and poor conversion efficiency. I have a small number of Continental bullocks bought at the same time in November and the difference in conformation and appetite is striking.

We have just received our 2020 BPS application form in the post. This served as a stark reminder that hormone use can carry up to 100% penalty, so we have no option but to suffer the greatly reduced efficiency that these animals imply.

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How the weather is impacting on crops, dairy, beef and sheep