With temperatures starting to rise, we are hoping that we have seen the last of the snow for this year. With some of the land backing onto the Lecht ski centre, it gives you an idea as to how high we are. During some of the worst of the snow, we were seeing drifts of four feet and more.

The weather this winter has been hard on the sheep, with them starting on feed in early December and this having built up all the way to now. Earlier on, they were on silage and swedes but swedes have become hard to find up here, so we are on stockfeed carrots and silage now. We have just split them up into their pre-lambing feeding groups and originally, we were going to give the singles no hard feed. However, the conditions have taken quite a lot out of all of the sheep, so they will all get feeding. We are using a home mix of equal parts rolled barley and draff, combined with a purchased 18% nut. The singles will get 1kg/head per day of this and the twins will get 2kg/head per day. Looking back to last season, I am really glad that we weaned the lambs earlier last year. This brought the ewes to tupping in great order. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, conditions have been hard since then and scanning was disappointing (Table 1.)

Looking at the results, our empty rate is no different to years gone by but the overall scanning is well back, further confirming the weather conditions since tupping. The empties will go off shortly, once we get a bit of condition on them.

Last year

Last year, we were hit badly by snow during lambing and it caused huge losses in one day. To solve that for this year, we have recently completed building a shed ourselves to get the mules under cover, should weather like that come again. It has been a great project and after lambing this year, we will lay out a sheep handling system in the shed. Having been up on the hill shedding sheep with the mobile setup last week, getting in to some shelter to handle sheep can’t come soon enough!

Building

We have another building project ongoing just now but we are not as involved with that one. Our landlords, the Crown Estate, have demolished a series of old sheds that were needing attention and are in the process of replacing them with a single span modern shed. With a blank canvas, as far as layout is concerned, we have taken the opportunity to sink some sockets in the floor to make up some bull pens. We have been fairly disciplined over the last few years with bulling dates but have had the headache of where to put the bulls once they are finished their work for each season. This will give us more flexibility with the bulls and calving patterns.

Spring calving is working away, although with the shed-building still ongoing, we are a bit tight for space. In years past, we had plenty of space in the sheds, but with the shed building ongoing, we are very short of space. Fortunately, the newly completed sheep shed is there and is currently a cattle shed!

Cows

So far, we have 21 cows calved and 21 calves on the ground. We have had one set of twins and one calf lost. That leaves 17 still to calve.

We now have 20 heifers to join our hill herd, with a mix of breeding. The majority of them are Highland cross, be that with the Shorthorn, the Saler or the Simmental. However, Jim Simmons, who neighbours with us had five Gascon heifers for sale and as he has been out-wintering his herd for a number of years now, we decided that we would try them too. They will all go to a Shorthorn bull this summer.

The cattle that we purchased to grow on over winter have done really well and we plan to start selling them soon. As we were laying out so much money for the heifers, we decided to increase our output to help pay for them. Our silage stocks were good at the start of the winter, so purchasing these 23 weanlings has worked well for us. Going by current market prices, we should have raised them by at least £300/head for a cost of around £120/head between mart finance, haulage and keep. We will look at silage stocks again this back end and if we have sufficient available will do the same again.

One of the stipulations from SEPA for our pot ale spreading is that we must soil sample the fields that we are spreading on every three years. SAC Consulting recently finished sampling the fields and we can really see the overall farm fertility starting to rise. We took Glenconglass on five years ago and it is starting to show some big improvements now. With the lime we have applied, the average pH has risen from 5.6 to 5.8. This is a long term project and we are aiming over the next couple of years to bring that up to 6. The phosphate is still on the low side, with there being little of that in the pot ale. It looks like we may have to bring that up using fertiliser. Potash has come on leaps and bounds, with an average improvement of 30% across the grass fields. The field that has been in forage crops for the last couple of years has gone from being moderate for potash to now being very high, with the concentration of the lamb dung during grazing. We will have to watch what we are doing with that field for the next couple of years to bring it back down.

Glamping

We have been looking for a while for ways to diversify our income sources and recently settled on installing four glamping pods.

These are small wooden camping pods that allow people to camp, without the need to erect the tent and are insulated, meaning that they are fairly weatherproof. Being in the Cairngorms National Park, we live in a popular tourist area and aim to take advantage of that. The pod site will not take up a great deal of space on the farm, but with a modest occupancy rate should pay back fairly quickly.

For anyone interested, we will have our website ‘Glamping in the Gorms’ up and running by next month.