Was it because of the torrential rain or a market weakness? Last week, despite my resolve not to buy any cattle until well after Christmas, we bought our first full load of cattle – good-quality, medium-weight stores.

This time last year we had no idea and neither apparently did anyone else, that we were just on the cusp of the most sustained rise in cattle prices that we had ever experienced. We were lucky to have been fully stocked as prices began to take off, but the cattle that gave us that capital gain will be going to the factory over the next while and it’s clear that the margin between selling and replacing will not be just back to normal but in percentage terms, less than we took for granted before the increase.

The gain from the increase has washed straight through to the producers of the raw material – the suckler and dairy farmers.

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The other major change from a cattle farmer’s point of view is that the drop in the price of cereals has upended the normal relationship between beef price and concentrates and has justified higher concentrate feeding than we have been used to.

As a dairy farmer remarked to me the other day as he surveyed the rapid decline in milk prices, “grain prices are too low and are encouraging increased output from the world’s intensive dairy farmers and reducing the competitiveness of our grass”.

But to come back to the present realities: the dry, cooler weather has allowed us to graze out the remaining paddocks with light cattle. All the heavier ones are in at this stage. Another week or so all going well will see the last of the autumn growth grazed off and everything housed.

I have always disliked having to do field work at this time of the year. Last year was very much the exception with empty ditches and firm ground. We had hoped to get the final autumn spraying of the cereals and oilseed rape completed but despite a few dry days, the afternoons are short and the ground was sticky with the large wheels leaving more marks than I would have expected.

We got some of the barley done with both a herbicide and an aphicide for the variety more vulnerable to barley yellow dwarf virus. The next priority is to move onto the oilseed rape. It has made good progress with complete ground cover. Given the high yield potential of the new hybrid varieties, it should be worthwhile to take precautions to get rid of the light leaf spot.