All round me I see and hear the hub of silage harvesters. A fine week at the end of May is the absolute ideal, but it’s passing us by.

Because our silage ground is mostly on the driest paddocks, we had to take a view whether we would close them up without taking a grazing or let the cattle out and have the benefit of spring grass early in the season.

As the wet spring dragged on, we grazed pretty well all the ground intended for silage with the result that we closed everything up later than the ideal.

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And as we had to get slurry out and the bare silage ground was the only place for it, we were inevitably further delayed in getting nitrogen out for the first cut.

The end outcome is that I reckon, to be safe, we won’t cut for another fortnight or so. Not ideal with this weather and even the late maturing perennials will have well shot out by that stage and quality will not be as high as we would like which will mean extra meal to the beef cattle next winter.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, I am not sure what we could have done differently, except of course have kept less cattle which again, with the benefit of hindsight and seeing how prices have gone, would have been the right thing to have done.

As beef prices continue to fall and losses mount, I have never heard so many wondering what Bord Bia is actually doing for its core constituency. With a levy off each animal slaughtered and our prices continuing to trail all European indices, the questioning is going to continue, especially with the major groups more than capable of handling their own promotion and marketing.

Meanwhile out on the tillage fields, I couldn’t believe when I looked at the wheat on Monday morning that the ears were all visible, below the fully emerged flag leaf. Suddenly harvest doesn’t seem so far away.

The petals are all gone off the oilseed rape and we have finished putting on the final head spray on the winter barley so that’s another enterprise with the field gates closed until harvest.

However, as I mentioned at the time, my fears that the cold dry weather earlier in May has meant that the pre-emergent spray on the beans has been disappointing.

The temptation of course is to leave it but weeds, especially bindweed in a crop of beans at harvest time, can be an absolute nightmare. I will never forget a son going alongside the combine cutting and dragging the bindweed off the reel as we tortuously got through the crop.

Later, up the road, I heard of a farmer who had destroyed the engine of his new combine under the same conditions, so we will go in and spray!