Today is the day that our heifers are due to start calving. We are looking forward to seeing the first calves born to the Aberdeen Angus bull that we bought last May. The intention is to keep the heifer calves for breeding so hopefully we won’t get too many bull calves.

Unfortunately, the weather is not helping us out much and with the recent cold spell and snow, there is no grass growing for newly calved stock to be turned out to. We have kept a spare cattle court for putting young calves into until the weather picks up a bit.

Our eldest son, Andrew, gets his Easter holidays from college this week so there will be plenty of work to keep him busy. Unfortunately, he starts back again just a week after the cows are due to start calving. Our other son, Harry, is on holiday a week later than Andrew and, although we hope to get him helping out for some of the holidays, he will have to get some revision done for his exams too.

The winter crops are now desperately looking like they need some warmer weather and fertiliser to get them going. We still have over half of the spring cropping area to plough.

Very little work has taken place in preparation for spring sowing since our last article. We did have a weekend of hard frost which allowed us to have a busy weekend spreading farmyard manure. We drafted in some extra help in the form of my cousin’s two sons, Robbie and Archie, and we were able to get three muck spreaders working all weekend with one full time on the forklift filling them. As well as getting on with the work, the boys also enjoyed trying out all of the different makes of tractors and at the end of the weekend there was an in-depth discussion about which one was the best. They were a great team and managed to spread over 70 acres that weekend.

Efficiency trial

Over the winter, we have been running a feed efficiency trial with Scottish Rural College, in conjunction with Harbro and Keenan. The trial has involved taking weekly samples of all the forage and concentrates being fed to a batch of finishing heifers and steers. The samples are run through the NIR scanner in order to analyse the quality of the feeding. The samples are also weighed and baked in an oven for 48 hours in order to calculate the correct dry matter percentage. This batch of cattle is also using automatic weigh platforms at their water troughs so there is detailed liveweight gain data being gathered.

The trial will be coming to an end shortly once all the cattle are finished and sold. It will be interesting to see the results of this and to find out how we should be adjusting our feed rations.