The Gammies farm in a family partnership at Drumforber just outside Laurencekirk. The farm extends to 131ha, of which around one-third is in grassland with the remainder in cereals and potatoes. Andrew is building up the commercial cow numbers as well as running a herd of pedigree Limousin cattle.

Currently, cow numbers sit at around 80, with the plan to increase this to 150 by 2020. Commercial cows are currently Limousin-cross and Aberdeen Angus-cross. The plan is to have all commercial cows calving in one 10 week block in spring, with pedigree cows calving in the autumn to better suit bull sales.

Andrew Gammie

The weather has caused some problems for us here over the last couple of weeks. It has been really wet and grass growth has slowed right down. This farm is quite heavy and becomes sticky very quickly when the weather turns against you.

We had been rotationally grazing 35 cows and their calves around a 25-acre block split into five equal-sized paddocks. This had been working really well for most of the season. There was a week at the time of the Highland Show where grass growth had slowed and we had to give the block a few days’ rest, but apart from that they had been on the same five paddocks all season.

However, with the poorer conditions last week, they were just dirtying the paddocks before they were properly cleaned out. I was moving them more often to keep them in fresh grass. With plenty of grass on the farm due to silage aftermath becoming available for grazing, we shifted the stock around a bit and took them off the 25-acre block for a week or so.

They moved to what we would consider one of the poorer fields on the farm. It would typically give us one good growth spurt early in the season and then struggle for the rest of the year. It was quite compacted in the top two to three inches which we are blaming on the high magnesium levels in the soil. To combat this we spread gypsum in spring and aerated it with an Alstrong roller.

The transformation has been amazing. We have had numerous grazings on it already and there is now a thick carpet of lush green grass and clover thicker than I’ve ever seen. We’re not sure if it was the gypsum, or the roller, or the combination of the two but whatever it was, it has really helped.

With the weather having been somewhat more settled this week it’s time to get them back onto the rotation and keep on top of the grass. Creep feeders are now with the calves and they are starting to pick away at the feed.

Making hay

As we nearly had enough silage for the winter from the first cut alone, plus 10 acres surplus grass from the grazing block, we decided to make hay of a 25-acre field.

We decided to go for hay as it is always useful to have on farm and will keep if we don’t use it this winter. It will also come in useful for the bulls when they are indoors.

It was cut and lying for a week. We spun it out a few time and made square bales. The weather had been fairly good; we would have liked one more day drying. But, with the weather due to break we decided to get it baled.

Our local contractor Geordie Johnston from Stonehaven has an 8×2 square baler so I asked them to shut to down to 7ft bales. The reason for this is we have a woodchip boiler and a drying floor that is 15ft wide. We placed the bales two wide on the drying floor for around 48 hours and it seemed to make a great job of drying them thoroughly.

Weighing cattle

We have always kept an eye on performance on the farm by weighing cattle regularly. I cannot recommend it enough in order to identify poor performers or when something is not quite right with stock.

Calving was in two blocks this spring with some born in January-February and the rest around May. On the latest weighing, January-born calves are 323kg on average and May-born calves are currently just shy of 170kg. When we break this down to bulls and heifers, average daily gain (ADG) for the males is 1.49kg/day and heifers are 1.21kg/day.

We are quite happy with this. It goes to show what good genetics and well managed grassland can achieve. The focus now must be to tighten up the calving spread to make management of stock easier.

Breeding

With this in mind, bulls did not go out to the cows until 1 June and they have a week left to go to complete a 12-week breeding season. I have swopped the Limousin bulls in the last week or so to spread the workload for them and as an insurance policy that all cows are covered.

We purchased an Aberdeen Angus bull in spring to breed all the heifers to. We went with Aberdeen Angus as we like the cross with Limousin and it will also keep the cow size of our commercial herd in check. Twenty six heifers went with this bull at the same time as the mature herd. We debated removing the bull from the heifers after nine weeks as they should, in theory have no issues going in-calf in that time frame.

However, as we are trying to increase the cow numbers, it was decided to give them the 12 weeks also in the hopes that we will have the majority in-calf. When we get the herd built up to the numbers we want we can reduce this to nine weeks.

This will see us calving from the first days of March and finish up late May. All that will calve in the autumn then will be some of the pedigree Limousin cows and a batch of recipient heifers.

Preparation for weaning

This year, I have decided to try Quiet Wean nose plates in the calves pre-weaning. They are a simple plastic nose plate that you put in the calves nose at weaning time. You can then leave the calves with the cows but they inhibit them from sucking.

The plan is to take all the cattle in, fit the nose plates and give the calves their IBR marker live vaccine. They will then go back to grass for about three weeks before we remove the cows from the calves. Depending on the weather we may hold the young stock out for another couple of weeks.

We are aiming to achieve a birth to weaning ADG of 1.3kg/day across all the calves. This is currently 1.37kg/day so we hope it will continue on until weaning. This practice of using the nose plate will help reduce the stress of weaning and therefore minimise any growth check at that time. I am keen to see how well they work and will report on their effectiveness in a later update.