We are coming to the end of what has been a challenging summer weather-wise. Weather reports would suggest that we have had around one and a half times the normal rainfall over summer, leading to some challenging conditions.

Despite this, grazing ground has held up remarkably well, with fields showing some signs of poaching but nothing too serious. However, with the colder conditions and wet soil, grass growth has slowed. We are now looking at how much longer we can keep cattle out for this year, without damaging next year’s growth potential.

The fields that we tried paddock grazing in this year across from the steading have all been rested as we were catching up on them a little. The cows that were on the rotation are now out on some of the rougher ground. Meanwhile the rotation has recovered and now has quite a nice cover on it. We plan to give them one more grazing with a batch of cows and calves before shutting them up for winter. By closing the fields up now and letting them rest through the back-end of the year, there will be a small amount of cover there going in to spring. Come spring time, the cover that we have left will be ready to start working far ahead of grass that has been pruned to the board, meaning that we should get a good, early flush of grass growth to shorten winter.

On the reverse of that, some of the land on the hill is now being shut up to grow on as deferred grazing. We winter our summer calvers up on the hill and using the deferred grazing first, we should be able to reduce the amount of silage that we need to carry them through the winter.

Thanks to the rotational grazing this year, nearly 50 acres of land was not grazed until well through the summer. By this stage, the grass was fairly well headed out and when the cows that had been rotationally grazing the paddocks at home were put on it, they were not happy! However, we kept them at it and cleaned the fields up a bit. This has really shown us the potential that we have with paddock grazing on the farm.

Our wintering lambs have also started to arrive this month, with nearly 300 of the 400 lambs on now. They will be here right through until the beginning of April and will spend their time tidying up any fields that need cleaned up.

We sprayed our spring barley off a couple of weeks ago and hopefully, by the time you read this, we will have it cut and have it in the shed. We are treating it differently this year. In years past, we would have cut the barley in the high 20s of moisture and mixed it with urea in our mixer wagon to preserve it. This was great in that it allowed an early harvest and saved the cost of rolling the barley as we fed it whole after treatment. This year, I noticed that we were getting quite a lot of grains passing through the cattle and was starting to feel that the early harvest meant that the grain wasn’t really ripe enough and our losses through the combine were too high. This year we are using Maxammon treatment, which is still a urea treatment but it is for much riper barley. It does mean that we will have rolling costs but it will save us from having to do the treatment as it will be done through the bruiser as he rolls it. These two factors should give us better use of our crop and with it being more mature, it will mean that the straw will be fit to bale sooner too. Hopefully, by the time you read this, the barley will be in the shed.

With the season starting to turn, we are looking toward winter housing. The cows and calves that are on the rented grazing next door have just been moved off that and on to one of our silage aftermaths. All calves will be coming home to be weighed, wormed with Doramectin and receive their vaccinations (against blackleg and pneumonia) ahead of weaning.

We will also be splitting the youngstock in to two groups in the shed, with any animals that will not be sold in the spring in one side of the shed and all those for selling down the other side. This past spring, we had a number of cattle that we didn’t think were strong enough to sell, so we kept them on and grazed them for the summer. They were recently sold and we are quite happy with the price as they averaged nearly £2.40/kg through the store ring.

With this success, we will again draw out the smaller animals and treat them the same next summer. They will tick over through the winter, to be ready to go to grass and really perform next year. Meanwhile those that are for sale will be kept moving to realise the best price possible in the ring. Keeping those cattle on for grazing helped to keep our stocking rate up and make best use of grass but longer term, we are considering other options.

With the potential threat of a significant reduction in support payments going forward, we are exploring ways of increasing our output without increasing our cost base. Pushing stocking rate would allow us to up our output a good bit and as we have quite a good gross margin on our cows, would up the net margin per cow by spreading the fixed costs across more heads. However, we currently have to outwinter half of the herd as we are tight for winter accommodation, so expansion would mean we would have to build another cattle shed. This is a significant financial outlay and we really need to sit down and do some numbers to see if it is financially viable.