Another week and it will prove to be hard to keep cows out in the cold November rain. It’s a case of trying to close out the end of the autumn rotation planner now and give paddocks a chance to set themselves up for spring grazing.

Weaning is three-quarters complete, with the youngest calves and heifers from the first and second calvers left. With the trees becoming bare, yard routine is shaping up.

Reading Gerald Potterton’s history lesson in last week’s Irish Farmers Journal about the 1932 to 1938 land war reminded me of stories my grandmother told me. While most of the farm she grew up on was able to be grazed or tilled, almost a sixth of it was out of farming commission, so to speak. It would break her mother’s heart to have to pay the land annuities on this as it couldn’t be farmed.

There is a combination of scrub ground and slope on one side of the road, and a marsh where I heard many a tale of cows having to be rescued from as they sunk to their bellies in parts of the extremely marshy ground.

From a farming perspective, that ground is still off limits but balances out the more intensive side as there is a wide variety of flora and fauna in there. It has a purpose in the greater environmental scheme of things but economically it would be viewed as being of little to no value.

The economic war put an end to those payments but brought other hardships.

There have been murmurings in some quarters looking for a similar calf slaughter subsidy akin to those dark days of the 1930s to deal with increased dairy beef genetics.

I would caution that in the age we farm in, we need to be extremely careful about what we wish for. Such a move could do more harm than good.

When I think a bit too much on the Irish beef sector, I get a bit concerned and maybe not for the reasons you might think. I often wonder that if we market grass-fed beef, why do we not focus on beef genetics that can best take advantage of grass? Has it the potential to leave more in farmers’ pockets?

But the more I think about it, the less I worry. As long as factories have feedlots then there is no real need to panic about whether I move to a grass-fed-only system or not.

Discussion

I hosted a different discussion group to my own on the farm last week. As I hadn’t hosted one in a while, it proved an interesting experience. By answering their questions, I got to view the farm in a different way.

It’s like an exam without consequences as I had to justify how the business operates and how and why changes were made over the years. No matter how many times you think about or see these reasons written down, hearing them out loud is a different experience.

Having a settled system with a focus on keeping things simple works well for me.

That’s not to say everything is right but as much by accident as by design that’s the system that works best for me.

You can make yourself extremely busy on the farm if you want but ultimately, does it pay?