Winter is starting to close in more this week, with a definite slow down in grass growth and grazing conditions. Cows are walking a bit slower everyday too, with the trek back to the milking parlour becoming a bit more of a challenge as the year winds down.

We have a group of old, slow and lame cows left in a closer paddock, which are only milked once-a-day to try to minimise the time spent bringing them in with the main herd. We will keep milking this main herd twice every day for another month and then put everything on once-a-day for the last month of lactation.

Roadways are starting to get messy on top again after the recent rain, so we will have to give them a clean up over the next week to try to keep them right for the rest of the year. We still have a lot of grass to get through this autumn, so meal feeding is restricted to 3kg and we should be able to keep silage out of the diet for the next month, or hopefully until around the same time that the cows go on once-a-day milking.

We have most of the slurry tidied up for the year, with a small bit left to spread on our heifer block. This will be sorted out this week and spread on bare paddocks grazed over the last week before being closed for the winter. We will spread dung towards the end of the month on paddocks that will hopefully be grazed between the 15 and 25 October and closed for early grazing next spring.

We should get the last of the hedge-cutting for the year sorted out this week as well, which would make a big change from last year. We are farming under a nitrates derogation, so we are leaving some whitethorn trees at intervals in the hedges to mature and flower as a biodiversity measure. We are also leaving some hedges to go onto a three-year cutting cycle, with just a rub at the back of electric fences to keep them working.

It’s very important to make these efforts for biodiversity and the environment. The hedge-cutting measures in particular can give us huge gains for small enough efforts. Education is key with these measures and it is just as important to explain to landowners how these measures benefit wildlife and why we are doing them as much as what to do and how to do it.

We have more work to do on water quality and pollution control as well on all our farms, if we want to keep farming with the goodwill of the general public. We don’t see every form of pollution leaving our farms, with nitrates leaching into groundwater and ammonia volatilising into the atmosphere – two obvious forms of invisible impact that our farms can have on the environment that need to be controlled.

A lot of farms have invested in low-emission slurry spreading (LESS) this year, which reduces ammonia loss and has benefits for both the farm system and the environment. Hopefully, we can find more technologies over the coming years to benefit both, but either way we need to keep improving in this area to renew our social licence to farm.