With the constant rain, land is cutting up badly but we are not ready to bring in numbers of cattle.

We have silage and housing but we would not have enough slurry capacity to keep cattle in from September to when the slurry spreading season opens in February.

We have excellent regrowth from the second-cut silage, so we have begun grazing it and we will work our way through it, shifting the electric fences on a daily basis for each group. It’s a lot of work but I don’t see any real alternative.

In any case, we can hardly leave dense regrowths of aftergrass through the winter.

We have shelved all thought of buying in more cattle for the time being

Normally, I would be confident that any poaching on land at this stage of the year should be superficial and that land should recover quickly and fully.

With the high protein and low sugar and fibre in the aftergrass, it would be ideal to be able to feed some straw and molasses but, again, we are not really equipped to feed groups of cattle in individual paddocks.

Not surprisingly, we have shelved all thought of buying in more cattle for the time being. If this weather continues, we will pick out the heaviest cattle and bring them in for early finishing.

As they are mainly Angus crosses, I reckon that on a high concentrate diet, we could get them to a reasonable slaughter weight fairly quickly.

Oilseed rape

On the crop side, the oilseed rape seems to have emerged well. We had slug pellets applied by a neighbour with a quad and an applicator.

They went out just before the rain, while the pre-emergent herbicide was applied two days after sowing to the hybrid variety while the Clearfield will wait a while, though I wouldn’t like to be going out on land in present conditions.

We still have to harvest the beans. Interestingly, the six or seven acres that we drilled into the ploughed tilled ground are fully ripe but the main part of the crop, direct-drilled into the unploughed stubble, is less advanced with the beans still quite soft.