It’s quite hard to believe we are just a month away from Christmas – where has the year gone? Despite the really wet conditions we have experienced over the last few months, we managed to hold some cattle out until last week. They were getting fed outside for the last while but it was a great saving of bedding being able to keep them out of the shed until now.

Now that everything is inside, we have a bit of reorganising to do with them. Weaning is currently taking place, the earliest housed have had access to a creep area with first-cut silage available and now spend most of their time away from their mothers anyway.

Once everything is weaned, the plan is to split the cows into three batches; fat, thin and a third group will contain both the in-calf heifers and second calvers that will need a little extra looking after.

The fatter cows that can afford to lose some condition over the winter period will be housed in the shed at the home house as the feed will have to be drawn to this shed from the main yard. This will reduce the amount of carting of feed we have to do for the winter. These cows will be offered ammonia-treated straw until six weeks prior to calving when we will introduce some silage.

The thin cows, which there aren’t too many of, will get a straw/silage mix to build them up slightly prior to calving.

Cull cows

Scanning will also take place in the coming week or so. This will determine how picky we can be when selecting the other culls. Sitting down and looking at the herd profile with Robert and Declan a couple of weeks ago we were deciding our criteria for selecting culls going forward.

Empty cows select themselves, after that we need to cull the older cows in the herd as we have quite a large proportion of the herd getting on in years. These will be the ones that cause trouble in years to come as they get older and productivity reduces. We will also cull anything that is any bit wild. Labour is limited enough on the farm. We cannot afford to have one of us out of action for any period due to injury. No cow is worth risking our own safety.

We want to get to a stage where cow performance is the first criteria on our culling list and by next year it will have moved up the pecking order. This year we will have weaning weights on all the calves, with the same next year it will start to build us a picture of each cow’s performance. This can then be used to make informed decisions for both culling, and perhaps more importantly for selecting replacements.

We have decided not to have any breeding period for an autumn herd so we will need more numbers coming into the spring herd to maintain output. There are six cows to calve between now and the end of January, these will be allowed to slip into the spring herd next year.

Replacement heifers

We purchased 12 in-calf Simmental heifers at Thainstone a couple of weeks back. They are to calve in February and March so they will fit our system just fine. They came in around the £1,500 mark which was reasonable enough. They are slightly bigger than the cow we want to end up with here but they should be perfect to breed with something a bit smaller in the future.

We are currently debating what other breed to bring into the herd. We have been Simmental/Limousin cross for many years which we are very happy with but the cows are quite big. It’s between a Shorthorn and a Hereford at the moment. Either of these breeds will pull down overall cow size while still producing good-quality coloured calves that should suit the store market and they should be easier finished as well.

The one factor that will be critically important is milk. We need to bring in a bull that will leave plenty of milk in his heifers. A stock bull should always be of higher quality than your cows. In this way you will benefit from the genetic gain in the next generation. Time is on our side with this one so we will have to wait and see what happens.

Growing cattle diet

The weaned calves will be offered ad lib grass silage plus 1.5kg of a 4:1 barley/soya mix. It really is amazing what good silage can do. We would normally be feeding the calves 3-4kg of concentrate throughout the winter. This year’s silage analysis has come back at 11.6ME and 13.5% protein – significantly better than what we have been making in the last number of years.

We have been feeding some older cull cows with the silage and they have turned inside out since going on it. We will definitely be planning for the best possible silage quality again next year.

Harvest reflection

Now that we’ve had time to reflect on the 2017 harvest we are once again struggling to see a positive margin in growing barley. Our yields weren’t good enough this year to justify the inputs. While the weather did not help the situation, we feel we need to do more to improve the return in the coming year. We have sown more winter crop this year as it should suit the ground type better than spring cereals. Definitely, we need to get our timing of sprays and fertiliser applications better. We’re hoping by streamlining the workload throughout the business it will allow us to be more on top of things in years to come. The arable enterprise is a large proportion of the business here and it needs to be paying its way – at the moment, it simply is not.

Tupping progressing

The tups are out since the beginning of the month and seem to have a lot of the ewes served at this stage. We changed the raddle colour last week to see any repeats or later lambing ewes.

We sold 44 fat lambs two weeks ago which came into £85/head and 120 store lambs that made £63/head. There are more to be sold store in the next week or two. It has been a difficult second half of the grazing season for lambs, they don’t do well in constant rain and with no sun on their backs. However, this is an area we can still improve on next year. We need to get more lambs away fat, earlier in the season.

With this in mind we are about to get some fencing done on the undersown barley and another 11 acres of reseeded grass that will allow us to rotationally graze all the sheep next year. We hope to have at least six grazing divisions that will improve the quality of the grazing for the ewes and lambs which will increase daily liveweight gain in the lambs.

While this is quite an investment in posts and wire, there will be a long term pay off for this in the years to come. The plan is to have permanent sheep wire around the perimeter with a strand of electric on top of this. This will allow us to tee into the electric fence for internal sub division with four strands of temporary wire.

We want to get this in place before calving and lambing starts in spring. Plenty of work to keep us busy over the winter months.