Recently, I was at a meeting involving some very progressive farmers and it was refreshing to see the enthusiasm that still exists for the beef industry.

At the meeting, there was a lot of detailed examination of our different farm businesses. But the one thing that stuck in my mind was something that kept coming up in advice to everyone.

This advice was to not put all your eggs in one basket. I take this to mean that you should have lots of various aspects to your business. In other words, you should not finish all your male cattle as bulls, but instead keep some as steers.

You should also finish your cattle at various times of the year. This is all so that you’re not selling everything at poor prices. If you are selling different stock and at various times of the year, then you will spread your risk. At the time, I thought that this advice was very sensible. Then I started to look at my own business to see what I could do and how this would work for me.

Two groups

I calve my cows in two distinct groups in spring and autumn, so I’m going to be selling my cattle at least twice a year.

I finish some as bulls and some as steers and sell some as in-calf heifers. So I’m selling stock up to six times a year, and this isn’t counting selling cull cows.

At this stage, I’ve got six or seven baskets of eggs to carry, and it certainly complicates things. Then I have my sheep enterprise which complicates things even more.

A few years ago, I lambed my sheep in two or three different batches and this meant that I was selling sheep almost the entire year-round. This was great for cashflow and it meant that I was spreading the risk of hitting bad prices.

The big problem was that I seemed to be lambing sheep for five or six months of the year. Then there were all the different batches of sheep I had about. Everything was very hard to manage.

Now I just lamb in one batch over a five- or six-week period. It’s certainly busy for those few weeks but then it’s over and you can concentrate on other things. However, it does mean that all my lambs are all sold over a short period. Quite often, this coincides with poor prices, but everything is so simple and easy to manage that it compensates for any negatives around price.

When I look at my suckler cow enterprise, I would love to have it as simple as my sheep flock, and I often wonder how sensible it is to have all these different groups of stock.

If I could calve all my cows in the one batch and sell them all in the one batch, it would make my farming so much simpler and easily managed. My farm might work well for me at present, but it isn’t always straightforward.

Dairy

When you look at all the top dairy farmers, they are just milking cows. They contract out the rearing of their replacements and they either sell their calves or contract out them as well. They concentrate on the one thing and do it really well. Perhaps it’s time for me, and other suckler farmers, to take a long hard look at what we are doing. Are we wise carrying all these different groups? Should we be concentrating on one aspect of our farming and doing it really well? At the end of the day, one basket full of eggs is easier carried than six baskets with only a few eggs in each of them.