The oats have been salvaged despite the weather conditions and I am now waiting on a window to get the straw baled up.

It will all be wanted this winter, the way things are going.

Hopefully the forecast of settled weather for this week will appear and I can wrap up my harvest for the year.

I am reassessing whether to maintain my small tillage operation into the future given the limited returns but it also provides opportunities for the sheep.

Having a small amount of tillage enables me to get forage crops sown into rotations and allows some stock to be outwintered without having to build extra housing, as well as providing straw for bedding the sheds.

I could possibly increase ewe numbers further or take in some extra heifers if the ground was back in grass, but I may sit down and try to put a figure on the extras tillage brings to the farm before I make any decisions for next year.

Disappointment

I was disappointed with the kill-out of my second last load of lambs, considering they had been receiving some meal for a period of time beforehand.

Up to then, the lambs had been averaging a 46% kill-out, instead of the 42% that day.

As a result, I have increased meal levels to about 500g and plan to get the heavier ones on to ad lib shortly.

Apart from wanting to rectify the kill-out percentage, I now want to prioritise grass for the ewes as the breeding season begins and hopefully I won’t have to house too many of the lambs for finishing this winter.

The forage crops that were sown earlier this year are making good progress and will help to keep some of the stock outside for a considerable period into the winter.

At present, there are about 30 days’ grazing ahead, with growth still ahead of demand. I am drawing up my plan to close the fields for the winter rest period as they are grazed out later this month so that I have adequate grass built up for ewes and lambs next spring.

Priority

My first priority will be to graze the wetter pastures, as these are the slowest to start growing in the spring and, if we get much more rain, the chances for grazing them out fully will be gone for this year.

These will be followed by the fields with the most shelter and which I plan to put the ewes and lambs out into first.

My recently reseeded fields will be the last, as hopefully they will be the quickest to respond to favourable growth conditions in the spring.

Creating a grazing plan can be difficult to do as the breeding season gets under way here, with up to seven different grazing groups going around the farm.

In an attempt to maintain a good plane of nutrition for the ewes during this time, I will use temporary sub-divisions with electric fencing. This will force them to graze out fields sufficiently without putting adverse demands on the ewes or causing too much damage to fields if the weather is bad.

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