All the heavy spring work is now done. We have never had beans sown so early, except that is when we tried one year sowing them in the autumn.

It was an experiment that I have never tried since. The crows decimated the crop, even though they were drilled to a good depth. I am hoping that with this year’s early sowing that we don’t see a repeat of that year’s damage.

But in the excellent weather, we have the crop well rolled and the consolidated seedbed seems, at least so far, to have deterred them.

The beans are in a full six weeks earlier than last year and there is now nothing left to sow.

Unlike last year, we have no spring barley, which was the final default from the wretched spring of 2024.

We can only mind the crops that seem to be well established and hope that prices and weather come right.

We still have some fertiliser to spread and weeds to take care of. The most urgent is to get nitrogen out on the oilseed rape before it gets too tall – the crop is maturing by the day, with blossoms appearing.

While the cold dry weather has been a boost in getting field work done, it has given us poor recovery in the paddocks we have grazed by day. Normally we would hope to have most of the store cattle out day and night at some stage this week, but we will postpone full turnout for a week or so yet.

Having so many in for so long is putting pressure on our slurry storage capacity in the slatted houses. There is no doubt there is an increasing interest in using an umbilical system to get slurry out on established winter crops, but we have made our buying decisions for this year and will avail of the good conditions to get slurry out as soon as possible on land we intend to close for first-cut silage.

We still have silage left but the end wall is getting closer than I would like. If we hadn’t made so much hay last summer, we would be in danger of not having enough silage for the cattle being kept in for finishing. In the meantime, with beef prices at present levels, we will keep the forward cattle finishing as quickly as possible.