Normally, once the middle of January arrives and slurry spreading season opens, our slatted tanks need relieving.

This season, we sold some finished cattle earlier and we have slightly fewer on hand than usual at this time of the year, so the slurry pressure is not as acute as it normally would be.

We also grazed the late aftergrass further into the November/December period.

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I must admit that I have also been influenced by the extraordinary market uncertainty, with an unparalleled drop in price between October and Christmas.

At this stage, there seems very little guidance on what price developments we can expect between now and April/May.

No-brainer

The amount of money involved to stock up with cattle for beef is so large and the risk of loss so real that it seems like a no-brainer that there should be some form of forward price guarantee on offer but so far, there is neither official encouragement nor private sector willingness to go down this route.

Normally, we would start to buy in young stock for grazing over the next few weeks, but this year I am not so sure.

On the tillage side, we now have all the urgent jobs done.

We got our sprayer going last week after diagnosing an emergency safety valve had been triggered.

How or why I am not clear, but once we solved the issue we had no problem.

The only crop left to be sown is the spring beans. Despite the soil having firmed up, we will leave the ploughing for a while yet. While everyone talks about getting beans sown early, at least on this farm, the sowing window seems to run from mid-February to mid-April and maybe even later. Last year we got the crop in around St Patrick’s day in excellent conditions, but the yield was no better than the year before when we sowed at the very end of April.

What is clear however, is the intense volatility in the returns from the crop.

Reading Siobhán Walsh’s summary of the price trends over the last few years, the €355/t in 2022 can now be seen as simply an unattainable mirage when compared with this year’s courageous but modest offer of €230/t from Dairygold.