It’s like I’ve been waiting for the rain to stop since July. At this stage it’s just a case of waiting until it stops.

Slurry was put out in the most trafficable part of the home block. These 12ac would be the flattest, driest, parts of the entire farm and still they cut up a bit. It was a case of needs must though, and I am in a very fortunate position to have had some ground suitable for spreading.

It was a good thing that we made the tank bigger than what we needed when the cow shed was built.

In the youngstock yard I’ve just got into the bales that were cut earlier in the 2017 silage season and there is a noticeable drop in intake.

Silage tests on the later cuts that were fed there had 30% dry matter and I’d imagine what I have moved into now would be higher in this regard.

The in-calf heifers were moved to the calving shed to take a bit of slurry pressure off the main tank. It also gives me and them a bit of time to get used to each other. Most are due in the first three weeks of calving, with most about two weeks into calving. This is because they had cycled the week before breeding began back in May.

If we hadn’t pushed back the calving date, they would be in early February. If the scanning results are anything to go by, there was no fertility fault in the young bull, with five of the heifers bulled on the same day and all held.

There was a similar performance from the cows, with most of last year’s May calvers now due in March and April.

There has been no final decision on what will be retained for breeding from the yearling heifers yet.

On average they are much younger than other years, but to get the BVD vaccine programme out of the way before they go off to the out farm, decisions will have to be made soon.

We’ll narrow the numbers down and leave nature make the last call on who stays. A handful knocked themselves out of contention already by being flightier than the others last autumn. We usually pick a few more than what is required every year. In 2017, 19 heifers went to the bull, with the aim of 15 going in calf, and we ended up with 16 pregnancies.

American breeder

I’d love to be able to do what one American cattle breeder I met a few years ago does with his replacements.

When the herd size reached the peak that his land could handle and the cows were performing well, he thought of an alternative rather than cull for the sake of culling.

He simply left them with the bull for 24 days and anything after that was sold. The replacement strategy he employed prior to this was to run his heifers with the bull for 42 days.

Fragmentation and the extra hands required to bring them in on our out-farm means this could be a hard sell but it may work in nicely with the plan to worm these heifers slightly earlier this year.

One labour-saving idea I implemented back in December has proved a serious timesaver. I deleted the Twitter app from my phone.

It’s one less distraction to have out in the yard and it was an eye opener into how many minutes it soaks up. It would be interesting to know how many hours per cow it took up.

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