Mark and Shona Mackay farm at Greenvale, four miles from Dunnet head in Caithness. The farm extends to 360ha and they run a 155-cow herd, selling offspring store at 12 to 15 months. They also grow around 20ha of spring barley for feeding during the winter months.

The farm is currently stocked at 0.74 livestock units per hectare (LU/ha) of grassland. One of the main aims for Mark and Shona is to push this further in the coming years to increase the overall output generated on the farm.

Cow type is primarily Angus and Simmental cross and the Mackays have successfully bred a medium-size functional cow herd. These are then mated to Charolais bulls to produce quality store cattle.

The cows are evenly split into two herds, calving in spring (March/April) and summer (May/June). The summer calvers are out-wintered on part of the farm, which is a help, as housing is a limiting factor. This is something that will have to be looked at if cow numbers are to be increased in the coming years.

Mark Mackay

Summer calving finished up here on 16 July and, touch wood, overall we have had a good year. The summer herd calved over 11 weeks, with only six calving in the last two and a half weeks. That meant it was quite busy through the second half of May and into June.

The majority of these calved unassisted outside in a paddock adjacent to the yard. We drafted them from the hill where they are wintered twice weekly as they came close to calving.

That way, if anything went wrong or needed some help, we could run them into the yard quite easily.

I think cow condition played a big role in having a good calving. Cows were fit but not fat and I suppose the exercise they had being on the hill also was a help.

That being said, we had one caesarean for a monster Charolais calf. He must have been over 80kg at birth. It was strange, as there were a lot of calves born to the same sire and similar cows, and we had no such trouble.

As of this week, we are running 146 calves and 149 cows. Two of the cow deaths were where cows went over on their backs and couldn’t recover. The other was one of the spring herd that got an infection post-caesarean.

The two calves lost at grass were as a result of pneumonia that came during a poor spell of weather.

Breeding season

The bulls are with the summer herd over three weeks now. We have put the late calvers together and are giving them the best grazing in the hopes of pulling them forward next year.

One of the changes we made this year was delaying the start of spring calving for a week or 10 days. This won’t be a massive change, as it is usually just the heifers calving in the first two weeks.

They will still have plenty time to go in-calf and with them getting to pasture two weeks earlier post-calving they should get a boost from spring grass.

This move will also reduce the amount of time we spend calving on the farm and should help give us a tighter bunch of animals to work with come wintertime.

One of the Charolais bulls went lame soon after being turned out with the cows. We called the vet and it turned out to be laminitis. We had purchased him in February and he had been fine up until turnout. We had gradually reduced his concentrate feeding after he came home and he was on a silage-only diet for the last six weeks or so. But it seemed that when he went to grass it caused the flare-up.

Luckily we had a spare Angus bull to put in. It just means we will have more Angus calves than we had planned for next year.

The Charolais is fine again now and back with a batch of summer calvers.

Silage

We are in the Agri Environment Climate Scheme, and one of the elements of the scheme means that we postpone cutting our silage until after the end of June to benefit wading birds.

While this does compromise quality, it is worth nearly £150/ha to us, so it goes some way to making up the difference. This silage will be fine for dry cows during the winter.

The contractor arrived to mow the silage on 4 July. We then wilted it for 24 hours and lifted it the following day, leaving us to cover it that night.

We are very lucky up here as our local Young Farmers have a great system for fundraising, where they will come and cover the silage pit for you. It costs £50 initial fee plus £1 per acre in the pit.

It really works well for us, as the cost is not high. We get to support the Young Farmers in raising club funds and, all in, the pit was covered with all the tyres on in just under two hours.

After the silage was off, we made a start at getting muck and slurry out on to the aftermaths.

Fields that got muck were spread at a rate of 17 tonnes per hectare. Those that got slurry were at a rate of 2,800 gallons per acre.

Some of the silage fields had been identified as having a low pH when we tested them in the winter.

Unfortunately, the results came back a little too close to silage time, so the silage fields that were needing lime were left at that point. Now silage is off, the contractor has been in and spread the lime on them.

Grazing

Grass growth has been OK so far, but things are starting to get a little wet. We had some real downpours last week that didn’t help things at all. Some of the cows and calves are currently grazing the aftermaths and the grazing ground will get another 100kg/ha of 27-6-6 in the coming days.

Heifers

We kept on a group of last year’s summer heifers for grazing this season. In previous years, they were usually sold coming out of the shed in spring.

We decided to keep the lightest of them on to try and put some cheap kilos on them at grass. They are looking really well at the minute, and if we had known what a good grass-growing season it was going to be we might have kept more. Such is farming: another year it could have rained all season and the price might be on the floor. They will be heading for the sales in a month or so.