I farm: “With my wife Joanne and children Nellie and Macartan, they give me a great help. We have 27 sucklers but are hoping to get to 30. We start calving at the beginning of February, wrapping it up in 10 weeks. I’m part-time farming – I work in a pharmaceutical company doing shift work, so everything here has to be quick and easy.”

Breeding: “We synchronised everything – AI’ing them all on the one day. After that the cows went out with the bull. We AI’d any heifers that repeated if we had to. We have a mixture of cows: Limousin, Charolais and Angus cows. Everything was scanned three weeks ago – one heifer and three cows were empty. They’ll be moved on after weaning.”

Closed herd: "We used to buy in replacements a few years ago, but now with AI we have complete control over our own herd. We are a closed herd and that’s the way we intend on staying. It’s more convenient and it's safer.”

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System: "We are flexible with our system. We had been finishing cattle, but with the way prices were last year, it didn’t pay to finish, so we sold them as stores.”

Grass: “We were feeding out bales to the cows and calves all July, we even brought in the creep feeder to take pressure off the cows. I put out fertiliser during the drought; I was worried it wouldn’t work but the grass got a great kick out of it. The grass is recovering and ground conditions are still very good. I think I’ll be ok for winter feed, we are not overly stocked. We have 260 bales made and I have a third cut yet to take.”

This week: ”Weaning is the biggest job coming up. All the calves are weighed. Weights were back a bit this year, but they have kicked on well over the last week or two. Decision-wise, I have cattle there I need to decide if I’ll finish them or sell as stores. If I’m finishing them, they’ll have to come in if the rain kicks up.”