What a great week...

We got an incredible opportunity to get the winter crops sown in really excellent conditions.

The cattle that we thought were in for the winter are out grazing by day and on silage and some concentrates by night.

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As I write, we are not quite finished all the sowing but with the forecast so good, we are expecting to get it finished and rolled within the next day or so.

With the Tirlán and Dairygold prices announced, the margins even on crops yielding well are frighteningly tight.

Profit depends on straw and what’s left of what we used to call the single farm payment.

It was also an ideal opportunity to get hedges cut and a ditch cleaned for the first time in many years.

I hadn’t realised how blocked it had become until we had cleaned upstream of it.

It was very clear that the water was blocked on the way down to the Liffey.

While we got it well cleaned out, there was strong tree growth with roots right down in the bottom of the channel.

The lesson has to be that regular cleaning is important.

These are ditches that were dug by hand and a full drainage system put in over 200 years ago.

With modern machinery, there is no real excuse for poor maintenance.

Earlier in the summer we had got our tracked digger fully serviced.

It turned out to have been money well spent.

It tackled the heavy work with no problems, so the threat of having to expensively replace it has disappeared at least for the foreseeable future.

The cattle are cleaning out the aftergrass paddocks better than I have ever seen at this time of the year, though looking at it pessimistically, heavy rain at this time of the year can rapidly turn grazed paddocks into a quagmire and leave heavy covers almost inaccessible. But we can only take it as it comes.

We have one load of late cattle left to go to the factory – once they are gone, there will be nothing sold until coming up to Christmas.