June is one of those in-between months but the shape of the year is beginning to appear. The winter barley is just beginning to turn and flowering is over and while I have been told not to expect a high yield, the crops are looking just tossed enough to suggest that they have got enough nitrogen and I have never seen so many heads of a two-row variety with 16 grains or more, so, despite the warnings, I am relatively optimistic.

The oilseed rape is now just a uniform green and with what strikes me as even and good pod development though the crop may be that bit too high for maximum yield. Unless something happens, the next treatment will be pre-harvest Roundup with a pod sealant. The occasional heavy showers and high temperatures have meant that the late-sown beans have got off to the best possible start but those same showers come from nowhere about an hour and a half after spraying the wheat with an expensive fungicide. We have kept a note on the last row that we sprayed. We will follow up and see if there is poor disease control in those last areas.

On the cattle side, we are paying the price for all the emergency slurry we took out of the tanks in spring just to keep things in control. We are left with a slurry that is too high in dry matter to handle with the slurry tanker so we are going to have to agitate using much more water than normal.

Finally, a thing I hadn’t seen for a while – a Simmental bull suffering from sunburn coupled with what I suspect is an allergy to buttercups. His eyes were runny and his nose covered with sores exuding puss. We took him into a darkish loose house and after two days of food and water he seems fine. I had seen the same condition in the odd horse, but in my experience, it’s very unusual in cattle.

I was sad to see the death of two stalwarts and fine members of the old AFT (The Agricultural Institute) staff – Pat Gleeson, a fine researcher who had been head of Moorepark, and Olive Daly, who looked after corporate affairs and communications and was based, when AFT had its headquarters on Merrion Road in Dublin, where the British Embassy now stands. May they both rest in peace.

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