The last week of low rainfall and mild weather has let us stretch the grazing season and has transformed the look of the crops. But despite the benign climate, winter is still on the way and the signs are everywhere. At the end of last week, we hired a cherry picker to clean the leaves and other debris from all the gutters. We used do this annual late autumn/early winter job with a simple ladder leaning against the top of the house – with the benefit of hindsight we were lucky that we didn’t have an accident and on sheer safety grounds, we have come to the conclusion that a ladder for this type of work is not on.

We also see ditches with water lying in them for the first time in many months as the days shorten and evaporation diminishes. I was conscious at the end of last week of a few days dry enough for spraying, coinciding with reasonable ground conditions. We wondered whether we should be going out with an aphicide. Normally, we would apply the aphicide with a herbicide but we had applied the herbicide immediately after sowing, so it would have meant going out with the aphicide by itself. We tried to get whatever advice we could and the consensus was that aphid numbers were low this year and that barley yellow dwarf was unlikely to be a problem, so we decided to leave the sprayer in the yard – at least for the moment.

Meanwhile, we continue to sell cattle as they become fit. This is the first time in many years that I am selling a few continental cattle that were neither bulls nor helped by the judicious use of what were, at the time, fully legal hormones. The margin is razor thin.

Perhaps mine were not the best example of good continental cattle but the lesson so far is that continental steers need more concentrates in the diet to achieve a grade 3 finish than the Aberdeen Angus or Hereford Friesian crosses from the dairy herd. I find this surprising as I had thought that the dairy-bred steers would be the harder to finish but they are not. What I haven’t got accurate figures on is the relative feed conversion efficiency of the two types of cattle but given the initial figures, I am not surprised at both the low level of family farm income on beef farms revealed in the recent Teagasc figures but also the fact that on well-structured farms with an active, interested rising generation that there is such a move into dairying.