After 63 years of being here, I find myself not so much learning brand new stuff, as re-learning bits and pieces that I had forgotten I knew.

Certain aspects of animal husbandry, for instance, throw up disease and health problems and after a vet has been here to sort it out, I then remember having that issue years ago.

Also, sometimes I wander into a hardware store and buy the entire guts for a new toilet cistern or shower, only to discover I had bought an extra one 15 years ago when the lavatory crisis last occurred. And of course, I stored it somewhere out of the way so I could retrieve it immediately when needed.

ADVERTISEMENT

These are some of the joys of getting older, along with trying to work out where I might have left the socket set or cordless drill when it is needed in a hurry.

It is quite fascinating to subsequently find the offending item and suddenly remember why it was abandoned in that particular shed. Young farming people probably won’t have a clue what I’m on about but give them 30 years or so and maybe they’ll understand.

Weight

Regarding personal health, the past 12 months have seen me successfully lose about a stone weight. This has been a bit of an up and down process, with the initial weight loss then tailing off during the barbecue season.

Call it old age (or more likely, it’s a man thing) but there’s some sort of invisible trigger in my brain that necessitates opening a few beers at the same time as lighting the barbie. This is wonderful for mental health and general feelings of wellbeing, but not so good for calorie intake.

The prolonged spells of fine summer weather therefore resulted in my health drive almost becoming derailed. Things are back on track now, but unfortunately there is nothing easy about reducing your sugar intake. I know a lot of farmers are in a similar position, and possibly a health scare ends up being the biggest motivator for a calorie reduced diet.

Relevant

One thing I did want to learn about last year was regenerative farming. I never quite understood the concept (I still don’t) so Susan and I marched along to the Fields Good Festival to see for ourselves if it had relevance for this farm.

After listening to several speakers enthusiastically telling everyone how it has transformed their farm incomes (not to mention biodiversity on their farms) I sort of came to the conclusion that it has little attraction for the likes of me.

It possibly works on large-scale acreages, but too much of it flies in the face of what I recognise as good farming practice.

The repeated mantra from the converts was that prior to switching to regenerative practices, the meal man and fertiliser companies swallowed most of the farm profit.

I suppose if you look back five or six years, then that could have been applicable in certain farming situations. But surely that equation has never looked more flawed than now?

To my overly simple way of calculating things, a controlled amount of meal feeding has rarely offered better returns. The argument for regeneratively farming was based on low prices for red meat production and high prices for concentrates.

As things stand, the opposite is true.

Nugget

However, I did manage to learn one tiny nugget of agricultural usefulness during the grazing season. But please don’t hold your breath; it’s not that exciting.

One of my silage fields has too much cocksfoot in the sward and it creates a problem when grazing after-grass with fattening lambs.

An area of about 2 or 3 acres (where the cocksfoot is predominant) in this 12-acre field gets rejected and I need to run the topper over it a couple of times.

But this year I ran a dozen store bullocks into that field for a few weeks and was surprised to discover they preferentially grazed this coarser grass.

I am told that the small hairs which grow on the leaf surface as the cocksfoot gets bigger are not palatable to sheep. It seems that cattle have no such qualms, so I’ll have to remember that one for next year.

I’ve a funny feeling there was something else I wanted to write about; some golden nugget that I had discovered in the last farming year. But guess what? I can’t remember what it was.