Harvest has been a real challenge – and continues to be so. Having got going during the second half of August, we were almost brought to a complete standstill at the beginning of September, and things really haven’t been going well all of this month.

The malting barley has all gone off-farm without any rejections, but with some fields having higher nitrogen levels than we would have liked. The maltsters have had to move their “goalposts” on contracts and have been taking barley with nitrogen levels up to 1.8. Concerto malting barley averaged 2.75 tons per acre.

We are currently cutting Laureate spring barley seed and hopefully will soon have all of this cut. Once that is done there is still wheat to cut, and a number of fields are still to be baled. No doubt this is a tale that farmers throughout Scotland will be familiar with this harvest.

Beefed up

The grazing heifers have now been brought in off the grass and weighed. They have had a disappointing summer only doing half a kilogramme of daily live-weight gain. They have probably been fed-up with the weather, the same as us, and have missed having some sun on their backs.

We have been selling prime steers, which have been coming to good returns. It makes a difference when someone actually wants your product.

The last batch to leave the farm averaged 401kg at £4.05 per kg, giving an average return of £1,624 per animal. We have also been taking advantage of the cull-cow trade and sold 20 in the last two weeks.

The workforce on the farm is now slightly depleted. Youngest son Harry is now back to school and our oldest son, Andrew, is away to college to start student life.

They are both around at weekends at the moment and, thankfully, the weather this weekend has meant we have got quite a bit of work out of both of them.

New cattle-handling station

Quite a bit of welding and engineering work has been taking place in the farm workshop during the last month. We are currently constructing a new cattle handling system for the steading on the neighbouring farm that we took on the tenancy of last year.

The system that was in place has been completely removed, giving us the opportunity to design a race and handling system that will allow us to work more efficiently with cattle.

There have been many head-scratching moments while we try to design the race into the cattle crush. The plan is to create a curved race with the hope that this will allow the cattle to move better through the system. Trying to calculate what the angles of the curves needs to be is proving to be a challenge, so the design is not yet finalised. We hope to have this completed in time for vaccinating calves before weaning.