Starting off the new year with a bout of flu and a chest infection that has me sounding like a chain smoker means that only the very bare necessities are being done around the farm for now.

It is with illness that the difficulties of being self-employed are apparent. Logically, complete bed rest is the best way to accelerate recovery. However, that has not been an option and, as a result, it seems to be taking much longer.

Thankfully, the majority of the feeding and bedding is done with the help of machines these days, so the manual labour required is kept to a minimum.

As always in January, I spend a good bit of time in the farm office filling out a number of paper exercises.

First up was the National Sheep Census, which required us to take a count of the sheep and their age categories on 31 December. These forms must be returned to the Department of Agriculture by 31 January.

The second task is to fill out a profit monitor. As mentioned before, I fill one of these out every year and find it really useful in helping to identify areas in which I can improve farm financial performance.

There is no point just throwing in any old figure, because for this to work properly, spending time filling in the form as accurately as possible is the only way it will be useful.

By comparing it with previous years, I am able to see where previous changes to my farm management have either improved or not.

It provides a focus for the year ahead and allows me an opportunity to try to work on any areas that need improvement. It also allows me to plan for the year ahead and see whether this year is a year for investing or not.

We managed to get the Central Progeny Testing (CPT) ewes scanned earlier last week.

This year there has been some improvement on the scanned litter size, but this has mainly been due to an increase in the number of ewes carrying triplets and quads and a reduction in the number of singles.

The number of ewes not in lamb is still a lot higher than what I would like to see.

We will have to take a further look into this before next year’s breeding season to see where we might be able to make any changes, if any, to try to improve things in the future.

I will rescan the empties with the ewe lambs later this month. Fingers crossed for some improved results with this scan.