The silage is in the pit and we have a couple of hundred wraps made so the feet are up this week with a few days off spent on a campsite in the south of Spain.

Unusually, we are probably getting more rain here than at home this week, but there’s plenty of sunshine and heat to enjoy between the couple of wet days and the temperature is in the mid 20°C range everyday despite the rain.

The weather at home looks great this week and will hopefully give everyone a good chance to replace the silage reserves burnt up this spring.

If it keeps up for too long, we will see grass starting to burn up on the dry farms on the eastern side of the country but that’s a problem for another day and hopefully we can enjoy the sunshine for a while yet before the farm starts to look too much like the ground out here in Spain.

Grazing

The cows are pushing on through some stemmy grass at the moment before we get back into some better quality aftergrass from wraps later this week.

We will have to take out some more stronger paddocks over the next few days to help to get quality back under control.

There’s a good team in place at home so this should all get done with the minimum of stress. Youngstock should be flying at home in this weather as well. We had our dosing up to date before leaving so they should hopefully be thriving very well, with full bellies of dry grass every day.

The breeding season seemed to be going very well at home before we left, so hopefully the bulls are not too busy with the cows.

Glanbia

It’s interesting to see a lot of change happening in the Glanbia boardroom over the last week. Something definitely needs to change at the top of the company. We continue to bounce along at the bottom of the monthly base price announcements even when topped up with our own funds.

The arrogance shown to suppliers from the individuals charged with delivering a strong milk price was difficult to swallow for the last few years.

Hopefully communication with suppliers will improve with the new personnel now, whatever about milk price performance.

The company that describes itself as “Ireland’s leading dairy ingredients company” needs to start delivering on those claims for its suppliers.

At the moment Glanbia are leaders in terms of quality and service for our customers and leaders in terms of the hoops we make our suppliers jump through.

We are a long way short of the pack in terms of delivering a financial return to our suppliers to make all these efforts worthwhile.

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