September has come rolling around and with it, an autumnal feel to the weather. With harvest now by, thoughts are now firmly on autumn calving and getting winter crop in the ground. We finished harvest here on 8 August, earlier than it has been for a long time. However, this is our first year with now spring barley on farm. Overall, barley yields were decent at 3t/ac, coming in at 17% moisture. It has since been propcorned. Straw yields however were about a third back on normal.

Silage

Second-cut silage has now been made. We got enough moisture just at the right time to make a difference to the yields – but this would have done little on its own had we not fed the grass well also, to maximise yields. Second-cut ground got 375kg/ha of 24-7-14 around 9 July. Overall, second cut has yielded at 7.5 bales to the acre of high dry matter quality silage. It was cut dry and wilted for 48 hours prior to baling.

We put one field into the pit as there was still room and the rest was all baled. There was nearly 530 bales in total. As it has worked out, it leaves us with more silage in the yard heading into this winter than last year. We are quite glad of this as all our silage reserves were used up this year so hopefully we will have built up a buffer again and won’t be looking at the back wall of the pit next spring.

Fodder

As we look to reduce the length of the winter as much as possible, we are doing our own little trail. Into a 20-acre winter barley stubble we have sown one half with Italian ryegrass and the other with forage rye. The thoughts behind this is to provide us with some cheap dry matter both later and earlier in the season on ground that otherwise was going to produce nothing until ploughed in spring.

It is just starting to appear through the ground and we will keep you updated on its progress and which, if any, was worth doing.

We had just seeded an 18-acre field with Redstart at the time of the last farm update. This was direct-drilled into a sprayed-off grass ley that was earmarked for reseeding next spring. We have had a decent take in the field but it could really do with moisture.

The plan for this was to graze whatever lambs are still here or else some of the fitter spring-calving cows.

We have 20ac of neeps for the sheep for winter feed. This will allow us to rest the grass parks for the winter months. This will mean we have more grass coming into spring when it is really needed for getting freshly lambed ewes out to, as well as trying to get cows and calves out earlier depending on the weather.

Sheep

Growing neeps is something we have always done here. However, in the past it was more for finishing lambs on rather than ewe feed. With the changes we’ve made over the last 18 months or so with the use of rotational grazing, we are now getting more lambs away at a younger age. Just this week we have drafted 227 fat lambs – the single biggest draw we have ever had here.

We knew the lambs were close, there has been a couple of disappointing days weighing in the last month or six weeks, going through lambs but them not being fit. However, they are a very even batch so we knew when they did come there would be a decent number.

The way the weather has been it has just taken them that little bit longer to get over the line. The lambs were weaned the second week of July and remained on the six-paddock rotation. However, with slow grass growth they had to come off it for a period as they were moving through the paddocks faster that they were re-growing.

We had planned on putting out creep feeders with them to push them over the line but we moved them onto aftergrass and two weeks later, what a difference that has made.

It means we now have over 60% of lambs drafted from grazed grass alone and we would hope to draft a significant number again in a few weeks’ time.

Getting lambs out of the system earlier is a double benefit, firstly we aren’t putting much time and money into them as all they are getting is grass and secondly, and maybe more importantly in the long run, it is freeing up a lot of winter feed on farm.

We have picked out over 30 potential replacement ewe lambs, we also have 23 gimmers to come in so we don’t need much in terms of replacements this year. All the culls were separated at weaning and are gone at this stage. If we do buy, it will only be a small number.

Autumn cows

Autumn calving will be kicking off in a month’s time. There are 45 cows and 18 heifers to calve. When we weaned this year’s autumn calves we put the cows to winter barley stubbles where they were quite content for a few weeks. Prior to weaning the calves had access to another field via a creep gate which allowed them through but not the cows. We were also feeding the calves in the next field to try and coax them out. This worked well and reduced the demand on the cows this summer when grass was at a premium.

We hoped we would be able to just shut off the gate one day that all the calves were out creep grazing and that would be the weaning done. The calves had other ideas however. In the end, we had to house the calves for a few days until they were over it and they are now out grazing again.

Spring cows

Grass remains tight for most groups of spring calvers, lack of moisture remains the problem but there’s not much we can do about that. The pressure will be relieved somewhat from now on as aftergrass from second cut silage becomes available.

The bulls have been with the cows 10 weeks now and we plan to take them away next weekend. We calved in 12 last year so moving to 11 this shouldn’t be asking too much.