Disaster. I think that’s the only word to describe this last summer, the most most difficult year of my farming career.

For three months, June, July and August, every animal on the farm, the milking herd and the young stock were on full winter rations. Forty acres of seeds had failed last autumn and again this spring, so silage ground was used for paddocks and I rented 200ac – expecting to make 1500t of silage. Unfortunately, this only yielded 750t. I made up the shortfall with 250t of second cut and 500t of bought-in maize.

I refused to open the clamp during the summer and bought in the necessary feed at very inflated prices, but resisted the temptation to buy-in maize delivered from south Wales at £100/t.

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One of the things I did buy was 50ac of clover and wheat which yielded me 130 round bales. I was hoping that this would be a high protein diet for the cows, but it turned out to analyse very badly and I think the problem was too much stem and not enough leaf on the clover.

The wheat had gone past the milky stage. It was very unnerving, but we’ve gone through it, albeit at a high financial cost, though we did dry off some of the autumn-calving cows early.

Rain

Come September and the rains came. Initially this was horrendous – short-lived thunderstorms with a phenomenal amount of rain in a short space of time.

As my father once explained, it was like trying to pour a jug of water into a milk bottle, if the air couldn’t come out of the ground, the rain couldn’t go in and would run off. After a while, things steadied down and we had some more gentle rain storms and the grass is growing again.

Initially this was horrendous – short-lived thunderstorms with a phenomenal amount of rain in a short space of time

Cows are out by day and in at night, on a ration of grass, silage and maize silage in ring feeders and under the wire. The grass is growing quite avidly, but cows are going in to the paddocks at a level which I should be leaving for next spring. It is growing behind them, but what value it is I’m not sure. I’m not even sure what value the base ration is worth. It includes brewers' grains but I’m trying to decide between 10 to 15l before the addition of any concentrate.

Dairy event

I spent a very enjoyable day at the South West Dairy Event. It was incredibly well attended with even a lot of Irish accents among the attendees. The cattle classes were very well attended and the Holstien judging was very exciting.

We rounded the day off by calling in at the Lely centre next door with three working robots and cattle housed. It was fascinating to see milking, feeding and scraping up all mechanised and computerised. This is because at at home we are constantly questioning should we make the move to robot milking? Can we afford it? Can we afford not to?

Labour

Our current problem is a team of three is milking the cows and because none of them want to work a whole week, this creates two problems. One is that they are all a different skill levels and we’re never quite sure of what they know and what they don’t know and two, it is so easy for each one to pass responsibility onto the one that’s doing the next milking.

Will we put in robots? I don’t know. Someone once said to me "if you want to see the future, look back", so I suppose we will go on looking?