It’s been a real struggle to get through it this year, but finally the end is in sight. Along with harvesting the spring barley, we’ve been trying to get winter barley sown. This past spring, we were so busy with lambing and calving that we had to have a contractor come in to sow some of the spring barley, while our drill sat in the shed. To make sure that this doesn’t happen again next year, we have increased the area of winter barley to 36ha this year. It is all for feed, split between Glacier and Infinity, both two-row varieties. The good news is that we finished drilling it all last weekend. The rest of the arable ground will go to spring barley.

To keep things weathertight, we have been trying to keep the baler as close as possible to the combine this year. The 10ha of undersown spring barley was cut last week and with there being a lot of grass through the straw, coupled with the catchy weather, we have wrapped the straw and will feed it to the dry cows over winter.

Cattle

One of our aims in the initial farm plan was to make the calving pattern more compact as, again, it is impacting on our workload. This year we have planned for a 15-week breeding season and the bulls are now out from the cows. Over the next few years, this will reduce until we get a nice tight calving interval of 10 weeks, keeping all of each type of task in one concentrated period.

We will pregnancy-scan all the cows at housing time and the majority of those not in-calf at that stage will be culled. If there are any young cows that calved late in the period this year they will be retained and join our smaller autumn herd. This is the only year we will allow slippage between herds as to cut the calving pattern down the extent we are by culling would mean a significant expense in replacements to take their place.

We sold 11 of last year’s autumn calves through Thainstone in early September. There were nine steers and two heifers. The steers averaged 418kg and made £2.28/kg while the heifers were 376kg and made £2.18/kg. Again, from the workload point of view, we don’t want an autumn herd but the plan is for them to be phased out over the next few years. As each autumn cow reaches the end of her productive life, they will be replaced with a heifer in the spring herd and this way we can maintain numbers.

Winter approaching

The land here at Arnage is quite heavy and gets really sticky when wet. This leads to serious poaching if cows are kept out too long. Unfortunately, grass is disappearing fast so we have started feeding ammonia straw to the cows outside. This is eating into our winter fodder budget, so we may have to treat more straw later in the season. Once we have finished with harvest work, we will have to start bringing stock in to preserve grazing ground for next year.

We have our winter diets drawn up, however they may change slightly depending on the scanning results later in the month. With the higher-quality silage on farm this year, we hope to use significantly less barley in the young stock diet compared to last winter.

Last year the growing stock had the creep feeder in with them until Christmas and were then fed 2kg/head from January until sale in April.

This year we will only need 1kg of concentrates in the diet, which will be a massive cost saving and yet we plan for them to maintain a similar liveweight gain as last year.

Sheep

Another part of our plan for the programme was to change the type of ewe we have. We are not happy with the current performance of the sheep enterprise and need to make some major changes. Over the last few years, we have built ewe numbers up quickly, however, the performance has not increased in the same fashion. Until now, the flock has been made up of primarily Suffolk and Suffolk cross ewes. These went to either Texel or Suffolk tups and were lambed outdoors.

While the ewes scanned well, their type was not best suited to outdoor lambing and we never saw the benefits of the good scan in the final weaning and sale data.

To keep management as simple as possible, the plan is not to breed our own replacements but operate an all-in, all-out system.

With this in mind, we purchased 80 Mule gimmers at Thainstone in the breeding sales and, being more suited to outdoor lambing, they will increase our sheep output over the coming years. We will still use Texel tups to give us the prime lambs.

While the ultimate goal is to have all ewes lambing outdoors and left to their own devices, this year, we will bring the gimmers in for their first lambing to keep an eye on them.

Dipping

Another change we made to the sheep side this year is we dipped everything in September, once the replacement stock was home and all the culls were sold. We would usually treat with a pour-on but the mobile dipper worked very well and we had all the ewes done in a couple of hours.

We have also given them an iodine, cobalt and selenium bolus in the run up to tupping to make sure they are in top shape for breeding. The bolus will cover them for a six-month period and they will be given another one at lambing time.

The undersown barley field that we have just cleared is where the sheep will be grazing for the summer next year. As this is a fresh reseed, there will be little to no worm burden on it and will give the lambs ‘clean grazing’. Between this and the fact that we will paddock graze them, we should see an increase in lamb daily liveweight gain. This will allow us to get fat lambs out of the system much earlier in the season, giving us the holy grail of increasing output value from higher early-season prices while reducing grass demand across the farm for the remaining stock.

This year’s lamb crop is currently grazing silage aftermaths and we have decided that whatever is not fat by the end of this month will be sold store. By then, preserving grass for tupping the ewes and seeing them into the winter is far more important than squeezing a couple of quid a head more out of the lambs.