With all the publicity around the increased incidence of bovine TB, it was with some trepidation that we started our herd test last week.

Most of Tuesday was taken up with getting the store cattle in and then having them and the beef still in the sheds injected for the skin test.

We read everything on Friday and everything was clear, so that’s it for another year.

We took advantage of having the store cattle in to take a bunch of hair from their tails to carry out a DNA test so that we could have them genotyped.

The bulk of the ones we wanted to genotype came from a dairy farm with Angus stock bulls without a DNA profile, so I will be interested to see the commercial beef value (CBV) of the yearlings we bought.

It is a tremendous advance in science that such information is so easily obtainable, though it would be a sensible development if all stock bulls were automatically genotyped as is the case with every dairy cow supplying milk from a herd in the quality assurance scheme.

With only beef cattle inside, with every load of beef that goes, our daily consumption of concentrates is going to go down.

We still have some silage left and some of last harvest’s barley which we are supplementing with maize to get the cattle finished in case anything happens to the current beef prices.

As regards this year’s silage, we still haven’t made any and I hope I haven’t missed the good weather. With good ground conditions early in the spring, we grazed all the silage ground with light stores but of course this meant that we put the nitrogen out aiming to cut in the very last days of May.

I am not sure if the nitrates will be taken up quicker than normal during the brilliant sunshine, though with the high sugars reported, the temptation is to cut once the contractor is ready.

That said, recovery after grazing is certainly much less than normal – the lack of rainfall is definitely having an effect.

Out in the crops, the weather is having different effects on different crops.

Trying to assess them, the winter barley and oilseed rape look as well as I have ever seen them.

The pod formation on the oilseed rape looks to be uniformly even and complete.

The winter barley is pretty well finished flowering and the heads seem to have lots of grains in an exceptionally thick crop that is at this stage standing well.

The oats panicles are now all out and the crop looks clean and healthy though normally oats is regarded as a crop that needs plenty of moisture during the growing season. The crop undoubtedly worst affected is the beans.

They were sown early and rolled, both to level the field and conserve moisture.

Up to now, they seemed to be growing well but over the last week or so, you can see moisture stress beginning to appear with yellowish patches where there was compaction or slightly shallow soil.

Wheat is usually resilient and the ears are just beginning to appear but it has got a long way to go. One consolation this year is that we have practically no wild oat plants appearing – at least not yet.