All cattle that are to be housed for the winter are now inside. The process we work on the farm is to bring in a batch of cows and calves and leave them housed together for a couple of days to settle. This allows the calves time to get used to a new environment without the added stress of being weaned. This year, we moved the creep feeder into the shed so that calves had continued access to hard feed.

After 48 hours we then split the cows and calves. The calves will move from having the creep feeder to top-dressing concentrate on the silage once a day. The ration this year will be 3kg of barley, and a 0.5kg of soya along with, on average, 18kg of first-cut silage.

The plan is to move them on quite quickly this year, we are a bit tight for silage, although keeping stock out until now has been a significant saving.

By increasing the concentrate level to young stock this winter we will be able to get cattle sold earlier in spring without affecting sale weights.

We will weigh all the calves as they are weaned so we can measure performance of each cow and each bull on the farm. To do this, we correct each calf’s weight for age. Bringing all calves weights to the same age (200-day weight) allows us to make fair comparisons across the herd.

This is the second year we will have weaning weights and it will start to build up a decent picture of how each cow is performing on-farm. We will present this weaning data in our next update once we have had a chance to sit down and go through it all.

Body condition score

The cows will then be divided into three groups according to body condition.

The first group will be thin cows. This will hopefully be the smallest batch of cows. Looking at condition as they come into the shed, we are quite happy with the condition on their back. In this group we will also have first-calved cows. They always get preferential treatment in the winter after their first calving. We find this pays off as they go back to grass as second calvers in better condition and we don’t seem to have any issues with them going back in calf.

This means they will be fed a mixture of silage and ammonia-treated straw in order to increase body condition slightly through winter prior to calving.

The second group will be the fittest batch of 40 or so cows. These cows will be kept at Kirkhill and fed ammonia-treated straw. They will have access to a field behind the steading for as long as the weather conditions allow.

This is in order to save some bedding and reduce wintering costs of the cows. This field has already been earmarked for reseeding next year as it has not been renewed for a number of years.

The final batch of cows will be those in the correct body condition that we can simply feed to maintenance throughout the dry period. This will be done with ammonia-treated straw up until six weeks pre-calving.

We will also scan all the cows in the coming week or so and pull out any that are not in calf. There is definitely one or two as we have seen them jumping since the bull has come out.

Depending on numbers, we will look to buy in some in-calf heifers to replace these empty cows. We need to keep output from the herd up and so we don’t want to reduce cow numbers for next year.

Winter crop

Prior to housing the cattle we were kept busy getting winter crop in the ground. It is hard to remember a year with as good working conditions as this year.

In total we have 40ac of winter wheat, and 131ac of winter barley sown. This is a significantly greater area in winter crop than last year as we continue to increase the proportion of winter crop on farm.

The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, the ground here is quite heavy and is better suited to winter cropping. Secondly, and most importantly, from a time management point of view it allows us to have more time in spring when we are calving and lambing and planning for getting stock out to grass.

Labour

As is the case on many farms, labour is a major issue here at Arnage. We seem to always be trying to catch up with the next job that needs completing. This is why we have rationalised each enterprise on-farm to make everything as simple as possible.

Simple things like moving to more winter crop as mentioned above, tightening the calving spread of the cows so that we have fewer stock groups and classes on farm, this is really evident come this time of year when we can wean all calves on the same day and there are fewer diet variations to be fed throughout winter.

Also, moving to an all-in, all-out sheep system has streamlined the sheep enterprise. As we are no longer trying to breed our own replacements, everything can go to a terminal tup.

These slight alterations allow us more time to have plans in place and react earlier to any changes or problems that arise.

Sheep

In saying this we still have work to do on the sheep side of things.

This year we had a good first half of the season with lambs thriving really well on rotational grazing.

However, later in the season we had an outbreak of Contagious ovine digital dermatitis (CODD) in the sheep. We have never had it before and so we are quite sure it must have come in with gimmers last year. We have since treated the affected lambs a couple of times and culled any ewes that were lame.

This is a risk with purchasing in replacements but it is something we will continue to do. We are going to Footvax the ewes as an insurance policy going forward and continue to cull hard for any lameness issues.

This means there are still a lot of lambs on farm that we would like to have seen the back of at this stage. They are now on creep feed and hopefully will be gone before Christmas.

The tups are going out with the ewes this week, this will see us lambing mid-April. This is back another 10 days on last year. We are lambing outside so we feel giving it another 10 days will help both grass and ground conditions at lambing time.

Arable

In order to have more grass in spring for both lambed ewes and calved cows, we have grown 16ha of hybrid brassica crop which went into winter barley stubbles.

The crop is quite decent but perhaps could be better – the dry conditions post-sowing did not help. Measuring the yield as of last week there is just over 4tDM/ha in the field.

This should provide 115 days of feed for the ewes which will see them through from post-tupping to the start of pre-lambing feeding. This will be strip grazed with roughage provided with either silage or hay depending on which we have available.