Fields are turning dark green before our eyes and the harsh wind has faded away at long last. After starting last September, winter is officially over.

Spring was always coming, but it played a very good game of hide-and-seek before finally revealing itself. Now we can face into the next part of the farming year. For us, it means fertiliser, fencing, and calves.

Soil tests in January showed ground reseeded in 2018 is fine for P and K, so it got a bag-to-the-acre of SulCAN to boost growth. I would have held off spreading this given the index four results in the soil test, but, as I’ve whinged about before, we were very short of grass last month. Using last year’s soil test results for other ground as a guide, the remaining fields got a bag-to-the-acre of 18-6-12. We will see how grass grows in the coming months before deciding whether or not to spread more.

The more I read about climate change, CO2, methane, nitrogen, soil, etc, the more uncomfortable I am using synthetic fertiliser on the farm.

We do not use much, but I would like to reduce it even further. Leaving aside the environmental concerns, being reliant on an input that can only rise in price in the long term means exposure to financial uncertainty.

There may be a place for importing fertiliser on to a farm as it helps offset minerals and vitamins that leave the soil in the form of animal flesh, cereals, and milk. But it should not be seen as a mandatory part of every farm business.

Setting our first multispecies grass seed in the coming weeks should reduce this dependence on bought-in fertiliser. As much a trial as anything else, we will reseed a field that was first reclaimed from rushes and set with rape in September last year.

The subsequent rain meant a poor crop but the sheep managed to get some value from it. This new grass will apparently need few or no artificial nitrogen applications, so we will see how it performs.

I hoped 2019 would be the year for fencing and 2020 would be for handling infrastructure and fixing up the shed. Alas, the amount of fencing required has only just dawned on me, so the yard and the shed will have to wait for their improvements.

We will continue putting up wire around field boundaries. Being part-time means every job takes longer, but hopefully we will get some internal paddocks sorted too before the longest day of the year comes around.

Setting up strainers, driving stakes, and pulling wire is not much craic, and it is not cheap, but I would never go back to depending on furze bushes and a few quiet Hail Marys to keep the sheep in.

With the sheep shed empty, thoughts have turned to calves.

We bought 10 Angus and Hereford-cross heifers in 2019 to see how they would go. The plan had been to outwinter them on the rape but the weather put the kibosh on that.

Selling them in December left a small margin though, so we will drive on with more of them this year. The first 10 have arrived and once they have settled, we will probably get another batch of 10.

The rape will be set much earlier this year and, all going well, we will have input and output figures to compare calf-rearing with the sheep enterprise in 2021.