A full month after the slurry spreading season opened in our zone, we haven’t a tanker spread.

This has never happened us before. Up to now, if we thought the grass had too much cover or the late-grazed paddocks were too tender, we always had some tillage ground to fall back on.

We have the spring beans to sow and I would be quite happy to spread 2,000-3,000 gallons/ac and plough it in, but the amount of damage we would do to the land would not, at least in my view, be acceptable.

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I notice some of my neighbours took advantage of the immediate post-Christmas dry period and have ploughed for spring crops.

We didn’t and at this stage I am glad we have waited. 

As we wait for reasonable conditions, we are thanking our lucky stars that we sold a few loads of beef just before and after Christmas.

This took the pressure off two of the tanks and we have transferred slurry across to the ones with the most room but this can only last so long.

At this stage, we can only take it as it comes and hope that ground conditions improve.

I remember in those more innocent days when I built the first slatted house we had a slurry tanker with an overhead delivery hose which we used to fire the slurry over the hedge as we drove down the road.

To this day, you can still see the higher fertility in a strip of ground 20-30 yards wide in the fields along the road.

Such an option is not available at this stage – to put it at its mildest!

It’s not only better ground conditions we are waiting for.

We are also hoping for a beef price that at least matches last spring, but the price seems to be stuck. The younger the stock being bought in, the higher the price per live kg and it is far higher than the live price per kg of beef cattle being sold to the factory.

All of this signals reduced margins in the beef enterprise this year.

Meanwhile, out in the tillage fields, the crops despite the incessant rain – are looking fine.

There are very odd spots with lying water, but the spraying we got done in the same immediate post-Christmas dry period seems to have worked well with the volunteer beans in the seed wheat gone a pale green as they visibly die off.

Despite the belief that winter barley does better in a dry winter, the crop is a vibrant green with, in the main, a good establishment and I am hopeful that not too much damage has been caused.

It’s approaching the time when I would like to be getting some fertiliser on.