We will finish up the breeding season on the farm next week. We have 10 weeks of breeding completed now, with six weeks of AI and six weeks with the stock bulls out. The bulls have only had 10% to 15% of the herd to work with as it looks like 85% to 90% of the herd went in-calf to AI.

Hopefully, we won’t get too much slippage between now and calving and maybe we can even hit the target of 5% of the herd not in calf at the end of the 10-week breeding season.

The cows are walking longer distances a lot of the time now as the herd size and grazing area increases on the farm. This is putting extra pressure on legs and feet, especially as the farm was being developed. We have upgraded the roadways as much as possible during this development and footbathed the cows regularly with various products. We also get the farm relief service in regularly to lift some of the worst cases.

We will have to cull a small number of cows at the end of this year because of foot problems but most of these are older cows with a lot of mileage up and may have been culled anyway. As numbers increase on farm, these issues tend to crop up more and some cows just won’t hack it.

When we had 140 or 150 cows, we had very few foot problems and hopefully we can get back close to there again soon. We will just have to become more ruthless with culling the cows with poor conformation or that present too often for hoof-paring.

We have probably been guilty of trying to squeeze an extra lactation or two out of a few cows as well.

The second cut of silage will hopefully be wrapped up this week with another 70 acres to mow and ensile. We will put most of it in a 400t pit in the yard and bale and wrap the rest.

We will try to get out and spray some weeds in the regrowth this time. The rain and damp weather as well as holidays came at the right time after the first cut, and hopefully we can find a window this time round.

We will try to protect the clover in these fields, with docks and nettles the two main weeds to try and control. Eagle will probably work best if we can hit them at the right stage.

Brexit has been the main talking point off farm this week and, having spoken to a few farming friends in the UK after the vote, they seem happy to see it go through. They are sick of regulation and other people’s values and standards being imposed on them.

It’s difficult to know how it will affect Ireland and Irish agriculture in the future. We may benefit from a closer relationship with Europe, and we could get hit hard with exports to the UK. At least we seem to have a couple of years of a lead-in period before it fully takes effect.

All we can do for the moment is control what we can inside the farm gate and put as much pressure as possible on our MEPs and TDs to do the best deals possible for Irish agriculture. Hopefully we won’t see a hard border re-instated in Northern Ireland although it’s difficult to see how we can avoid it.

The movement of stock will also become a lot more restricted if and when the exit happens.