Lochaber Monitor Farm

Chris and Malcolm Cameron from Strone Farm near Banavie, Fort William run the Lochaber Monitor Farm. They recently held an open day at their on their 1,200ha hill farm to highlight the changes they have made to their business in the first twelve months of the project, and to discuss their plans going forward.

While Chris may be farming 1,200ha in total, he would only describe approximately 50ha of it as good grassland which highlights the high level of management that is required in order to ensure the farm can support his 500-Cheviot ewe flock along with his pedigree Limousin herd that is moving to 50 cows.

The business was changing before he entered the Monitor Farm Programme, moving away from a completely hill flock. Due to a serious predation problem around Strone, ewes have been sent away to lamb for several years. The Camerons recently took on an additional 42ha rented grazing at Fassfern, 11 miles from the home farm. This year they lambed their ewes with twins there. The ewes with singles were sent to rented grazing land near Inverness shortly after lambing.

“We have continued the move away from a traditional hill flock,” Chris said. “We are also going to be finishing our lambs for the first time this year. Lambing on the farm begins on 10 April.

“They are being creep fed now and the plan is to wean them soon. Then it will be feeding them for slaughter and I could see the first lambs being fit in September. Once they hit 40kg they will be down the road.

“We recently took on an additional 42ha with about 14ha of this good grass that needs a bit of work. The pH is about 4.7 so we have a liming programme for the next few years. The plan is to go out with 3t/ac this year and then another 2t/ac in two years’ time. We only have the lease for five years but it is worth the investment.

“The estate will pay for half of the costs of the lime and we have our own lime spreader so we can make the best use of what we have to help reduce the costs.

“We bought a lime spreader in 2014 and have seen grass quality across the farm improve since then.

“With the new land we have taken on we also got additional sheds with that too so we have plenty of space to house stock over the winter. Silage now becomes the limiting factor, we are just limited on good land that silage can be made on,” Chris admitted.

Lambs

Lambs have received their first worm dose of the year in the past few weeks. “Lambs have gotten a worm dose and a vitamin dose bolus in the last week, they also got a Heptavac-P vaccination. It was more a pre-emptive dose than anything, I was getting a bit worried it was later than we would normally do it.

“We were traditionally a hill farm but it wasn’t working. We have a very bad fox and sea eagle problem here where only 40% of the lambs were surviving. We were only getting 75-80% of ewes lambing up on the hills and then we were losing half of these, mainly due to predators. It came to the point where the cost of getting people in to control the foxes was costing more than we were making from the lambs so we had to change the system.

“The hills are a fantastic place for dry hoggs and dry ewes but they just didn’t suit young lambs.

“We will be shearing the lambs and putting them up in the next week.

Bull issues

A pure bred Limousin herd is also kept on the farm with 47 cows currently kept. Calving on the farm is all year round and while block calving has been discussed, Chris does not believe that it would suit his system.

“We have had a big problem with bulls over the past three years. One had an issue with his legs, another came down off a cow wrong and fell on his back and hurt it and the last one had fertility issues. It has just been a very bad run of luck. The herd is meant to be a two-bull herd but it has really only been the other old bull on the farm that has been working over the last few years as the young bulls have been out of action.

“Potentially if we had better grass we could tighten up calving,” Chris admitted.

The Monitor Farm Programme is managed by Quality Meat Scotland (QMS) and AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds, funded by the Scottish Government.

Morayshire Monitor Farm Pelvic measuring another marketing tool

Recent changes on the Morayshire Monitor Farm has seen Iain Green try pelvic measuring on his maiden heifers.

“It was all a bit of an experiment,” admitted Iain. “We measured them when they went to the bull. My daughter and stockman are qualified AI technicians so they were able to do it themselves.

“It is not the be all and end all but it can be used as an extra marketing tool. It gives me an extra level of confidence when I am selling heifers to other breeders.”

Pelvic measuring is where the height and width of the pelvis are measured before pregnancy. This can then be compared to the score that heifers receive for calving ease and calf size. Last year, measurements were taken for 31 heifers on the farm.

“Most of the heifers were selected due in part to their reasonably large pelvic measurements, and most of them did very well at calving with only five of the 31 needing any assistance,” according to Iain.

“However, there was one heifer in the mix with a particularly small pelvis who I left in because she just looked such a cracker, and unfortunately she was one of just two heifers who needed a caesarean. Her calf was a good size but not that large.”

The farm runs a herd of 580 Simmental cows, with both pedigree and commercial stock kept. The herd is split between autumn and spring calvers.

“When it comes to breeding, we will put about 35 commercial cows to one bull. The pedigree cows would be less and young bulls would probably go with 17-18 cows just to give them a bit of chance.”

After what was a challenging spring on many fronts, stock have recovered well according to Iain: “Stock are doing well at the moment but the ground is extremely dry. We haven’t had rain since 5 May.”

“We are just after weighing autumn-born bull calves who would have been born from the end of August on. They are averaging about 450-480kg, the heaviest bull was 540kg. These have only just been weaned, autumn born heifers are not yet weaned but will be in the next week or so and they will be weighed too. Bulls have been getting about 2kg of creep feed, with creep feeding starting in January.”

Straw scarcity

The dry weather is also having an effect on arable crops and in particular spring barley.

“I have this horrible feeling that straw is going to be very scarce. We use all of our own straw and don’t sell any but I don’t think we will have enough this year. The spring barley is very short so the straw yield will be down this year without a doubt,” according to Iain.

“The fear now is that if we get too much rain that we will get second growth in the spring barley.”

Ewe losses

The difficult spring was felt on the farm, especially on the 600-ewe flock. “We probably had the biggest losses that we ever had this year in terms of ewes. Our losses were about 4% of ewes and even though they came in as they were just about to lamb it was just such a difficult spring. There were just too many lambs on ewes, it’s just frustrating losing ewes. Ewes were scanned at 218% and after lambing we were at 191%,” according to Iain.

Sutherland Monitor Farm

Pasture a key focus

At a recent farm meeting on the Clynelish Farm of Jason Ballantyne and his wife Vic the Monitor Farmers in Sutherland, the focus was very much on getting as much as possible from a pasture-based system.

Speaking on the day was Trevor Cook from SAC: “Pasture is the cheapest feed farmers can utilise. Over the years farmers have become focused on price per head but should be maximising price per hectare. This can be done by focusing to spend less on pasture but produce more by controlled or rotational grazing.”

Trevor focuses on a farm’s ability to control the allocation of pasture to stock. “You need to be in control of access and size of the area of pasture. This will allow you to adjust supply to meet variable demand,” Trevor said. “Control encourages pasture to grow and increases the quality of the pasture available too.” He also highlighted the need to build resilience into your system with a buffer of silage for example. According to Trevor: “To make a profit from grass you need to grow lots of grass, utilise 80% of the pasture grown and allocate the least amount of pasture to achieve the production objectives.”