It surely can’t already be September. The calendar seems to be turbo charged. The ewes at home have had a tough summer, especially the twins. I’ve been hard on them because I was keeping some fields ungrazed to maintain soil protection in the heat. Now this is paying dividends as now there is a good bite of clover available for the weaned lambs and a clean bite for the ewes to build up on. Lamb sales continue with the Beltex-cross lambs fetching a premium. Another Beltex ram will be bought this year to strengthen these sales and our shearling-cross ram production.

The autumn calves have been weaned onto aftermath and a bite of feed. This is the first feed they’ve had. At weaning most of the bullocks had achieved about 1kg a day of growth with the heifers about 10% behind. Given most were out of heifers, all are native-bred and done without creep. I’m quite happy. They’ll stay out until late autumn before housing and selling next march.

Fodder

Last winter I terrified myself when I started to look at the costs of over-wintering suckler cows, so plans were made to have forage crop in place for strip-grazing for the first half of the winter, utilising the hill as a run back instead of housing the cows and feeding silage for six/seven months or having them hanging around ring feeders outside up to their bellies in… well, up to their bellies! Scroll forward five months to find that straw is indeed being spun into gold, the silage crop is back 20% (our area fared better than many in the dry weather).

So instead of 1,000+ bales of forage we’ve only 820 bales for the winter but thankfully also 20ac of stubble turnips where there was 20ac of old grass. Maybe luck was on our side? Then the turnip sawfly appeared with a cheery wave and instead of a stunning crop of stubble turnips to brag about, it’s a field of lacy stalks. A spray has averted disaster but there will be 20-25% of the final crop less due to the check and the unavoidable damage done with the sprayer. An unexpected uplift in the second-cut yield means we are winter safe though, maybe that’s the luck?

While the last 12 months at home have been incredibly challenging, they’ve been very good in one respect. The weather has demonstrated some issues in the on-farm resilience. It has shown the definite need to maintain production at around 80% capacity. To increase the production, first we need to increase the capacity. Younger swards, healthier soils, getting ‘shoulders’ onto our grass growth, better genetics are all areas that can be improved. The 20% margin allows for those all too regular vagrancies in weather, politics, markets and economy. Units, like our home unit, without that margin are going to increasingly suffer going forward. That said, it is probably what is called farming rather than agriculture.