By early April, the winter should be well and truly over. Ground should be firm enough to have cattle out day and night, even if it does rain, and tillage farmers should be able to take it for granted that they can sow the remainder of the spring crops. Not this year.

We had a few pens of the light store cattle out by night last week.

They were marking the ground more than I would like, but we were moving them onto fresh grass every day.

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With a terrible forecast for the Easter weekend, we decided we would rehouse everything.

In the event, the weather turned out to be much less extreme than we expected with some wind and bits of showers but we overreacted to the warning.

With a welcome strengthening of the beef price on the cards, we should have a few loads fit over the next few weeks. Whether we replace fully or not will depend on how the store market looks but also how much we close up for first-cut silage.

The ground has been too soft to graze up to now, so at this stage, we have a sward that is almost fit to ensile

We will have to make up our mind this week and get the fertiliser spread as well as getting slurry spread on a field we had grazed with sheep.

One of the dilemmas is the huge cover of grass on a few low-lying reseeded paddocks.

The ground has been too soft to graze up to now, so at this stage, we have a sward that is almost fit to ensile.

We faced the same problem with the ground we have earmarked for the beans.

We had spread slurry on it in less-than-ideal conditions, but we had no real option as for the first time we got no slurry out on any grassland during January or February.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better to have seen if there was an umbilical system to hire in for the job but we stuck with the slurry tanker with wide tyres and a four-wheel-drive tractor.

However, under the tracks in the field, we had more compaction than I would like when we went to plough.

As we ploughed at the beginning, the ground had slabs of each turned up so we pulled out and earlier this week on the bank holiday Monday, we went back in and finished in much better conditions.

The price per litre was a full 50% more than the previous time

However, we will have to run a disc over the entire field and hopefully we will then get a reasonable seed bed to be able to sow with the one pass.

After the discing, the intention is to get a small amount of compound fertiliser across the field to give the beans every chance to emerge quickly. Hopefully conditions will allow for a light rolling and the application of a pre-emerge herbicide.

Meanwhile, we filled up our diesel tank. The price per litre was a full 50% more than the previous time, so every 1,000 litres is costing almost €1,500, an enormous increase.