We are finally at the end of the drought here at Ardhuncart. Grass growth has really suffered with the dry weather and it has been fairly challenging for the stock.

This year, we split a reseed into three for the ewes and lambs to graze on, with the intention of leaving them out there for the whole summer.

Unfortunately, grass growth was hampered with the dry spell and it has been particularly difficult to keep the lambs going.

Feed

The dry weather has also been felt in the silage pit with first cut being about a third less than last year.

However, it was taken nearly a month earlier than last year after we identified in mid-June that the grass had grown as much as it was going to grow and waiting for bulk was only going to mean losing quality for very little extra silage.

This allowed us to set up for a second cut and this has gone some way to making up the shortfall, but we are still going to be tight for silage for the winter.

On the other hand, the barley has not seen much of an affect from the weather with yields only really being back by about 0.75t/ha. Straw is also back a little but again not by much.

This will serve us well going in to the back end as normally we would buy a lot of straw.

We identified the straw issue earlier in the summer and took a number of steps to alleviate it for winter.

Stubble turnips were sown out after harvest.

Firstly, the Haugh field that lies down beside the Don is a much lighter field than the rest of the farm, so once the barley and straw was cleared, we sowed out stubble turnips.

These will be used to keep the dry cows out on for a good part of the early winter. This will both save straw for bedding and also save silage. We will need to use some silage as roughage for the cows when they are on the stubble turnips but it will be a lot less than we would use were they to be housed.

Secondly, we booked two loads of wood fines in August. This will also save bedding straw, with the plan being to put all of the growing cattle, the back end calvers and the dry cows up until a month before calving on to it.

We anticipate that this will save us somewhere in the region of 275 bales of bedding straw, for a cost of around £1,500, a saving of around £4,000 when compared to straw at £20/bale.

This will mean that we will have to compost the muck from these sheds for a year more than we would with normal dung but with straw costs where they are, we need to look to alternatives.

The other advantage with the wood is that it will mean less time spent bedding, freeing us up for other tasks over winter.

Out-wintering heifers

We are also looking at out-wintering our bulling heifers as they are not needing to grow much over winter to be fit for the bull next year. This again will save on straw and mean that we will have a much lower wintering cost this year.

Our back-end heifers all finished calving on the 25 July and we have a good strong batch of 15 to go forward for sale in October.

It is a job we really like doing and we have been working away at it for a few years now.

However, being short of feed, we decided not to purchase any heifers to bull for sale next autumn. This will reduce our output a little next year but at the same time, we do not have the costs to carry finding feeding and bedding this winter, so it should balance out.

There are no changes to our spring-calving heifer enterprise though, with 30 bulled to either be sold in May or kept and used as replacements for our own herd.

The intention is for them to be bedded on straw over the winter.

Sheep

Our sheep side has suffered some disappointment this autumn, between the grass growth and poor ewe lamb prices.

We decided not to sell any of the ewe lambs at the price we were offered and have kept more to be gimmered for next year.

However, we will not carry any more sheep through the winter as we will send more ewe lambs off fat.

Those that have already gone off fat have worked away okay but, as mentioned earlier, the poor grass growth has not done them any favours. We decided in August to put the wedder lambs onto a feed hopper to get them away.

We would have really liked to put them away off grass, to save costs but they just weren’t doing, and we could see the lambs changing within days of putting the feed out.

While the feed is another cost to the business, it is far cheaper to get these lambs away than to have them eating up precious feed reserves in to the back end.

We also took the decision in August to book some of our fertiliser needs for next year. With there being a poorer harvest worldwide and higher grain prices, we expect the demand for fertiliser to be higher in to next spring as farmers both at home and abroad plant more cereals. We secured a full artic load of 25:5:5 at £250/t with the intention being to use it on both the grazing and to top dress the spring barley.

We also plan to target the dung better on the arable ground over winter and in to spring. The intention is that this will also save us on fertiliser cost.

The other advantage with the dung is that this year really demonstrated the benefits of organic matter on the arable fields with regards to water holding ability.

Looking at our Haugh field, had we not given it muck over the years, we expect that the spring barley would have struggled to reach 5t/ha this year. The organic matter from the muck really did show down there, with yields nearer 6.25t/ha. At £170/t for feed barley, the extra 1.25t/ha is worth £212/ha to us.