It’s time to stand back to see if there is anything we should be recognising that we cannot get done this year or if we should continue to wait until normal weather resumes?

On the cattle side, the first thing to count is how much silage is left. Normally, we easily have enough to get us through to when we have the first cut safely in.

That’s the end of May or the first few days of June. We might get there with our existing stocks of silage, hay and straw, with the heavy cattle supplemented with barley and distillers grains and the light cattle grazing for a few hours by day.

It’s a laboursome system letting them out and bringing them in from various paddocks, but the damage they would do if they were out day and night would set us seriously back for the rest of the year.

As it is, they are doing definite marking on the tender land, but we reckon that after one grazing it should recover fully at this time of the year.

Cattle

We are selling the fit cattle as quickly as we can and are feeding extra barley to get them finished and out of the place. I wasn’t that surprised that Met Éireann predicts three to four times the normal rainfall in some places for this time of the year.

Our intention is to get the fertiliser spread on the first cut silage ground within the next ten days.

On the tillage side we still have no compound fertiliser out. We tried to put out the second split of nitrogen on the oilseed rape last week, but we pulled out when we saw the mucking we were doing on the tramlines. Hopefully we will get it out before the crop gets too tall.

Needless to say, we haven’t touched the beans ground since we pulled out after ploughing a few acres three weeks ago. I cannot think of what we might do with the fields intended for beans if we do not get them sown by roughly 25 April, which I recognise is much later than the ideal.

We optimistically took delivery of a high potash compound last week for the silage and will spread it on the first cut silage ground as soon as conditions allow.

The next few weeks are clearly going to be crucial for the farming year of 2023.