2018 has begun with the usual share of promise and problems.

I constantly remind myself that farming is a biological business and I will never have 100% perfection.

Mortality in this crop of bought-in weanlings has been higher than normal at over 2% so far despite full routine vaccination and parasite control programmes. The problems seem mainly to be lung-related and I am blaming the wet summer for unusually heavy worm infestations and liver damage. We have, I suspect, more fluke than usual in the bought-in stock.

Christmas

Just before Christmas, I was glad to see my beans production aid payment land in my bank account. The Department efficiency in payments delivery is really excellent. However, the payment of roughly €86/acre is down from the €100 received last year. I am assuming that this is because more than 30,000 acres of beans have been sown nationally and, so, the €3m provided has had to be shared out across a larger number of acres.

Beans

Last year’s beans are now clearly visible in the seed wheat but I have never had much difficulty in controlling these volunteer beans. However, at this time of the year, they give the field a careless, weed-infested appearance. I suspect the weed infestation in one of the oilseed rape crops is more serious. I had to plough up one of the three fields following poor germination and a second one seems to have a large element of charlock or praiseach. This is much more difficult to control, if not impossible, as of course charlock is closely related to rape itself.

Cereal crops

Elsewhere, the cereal crops seem to be really well established with very few problems as regards slugs or bare patches but looking at my soil analysis returns, it looks as if I will have to spread 3.5cwt to 4cwt of 10.10.20 on pretty well all the cereal ground again this year. Despite applying slurry to as much of the tillage ground as possible, and P and K every year, I am still finding it almost impossible to get the phosphate index figures up with too many fields still showing up at 1ppm to 3ppm or stubbornly in index I.