They say that wilful waste makes for woeful want. If there is one place where this warning is heeded it is Presley farms in Wardford. Colin Presley and his wife Anne have nothing but a desire to make the most out of their 590ac tenant farm near Methlick in Aberdeenshire.

The Presleys run a mixed enterprise that consists of 950 English Mule ewes, 290ac of cereals and the contract fattening of 500 pigs a year. Colin is the third generation of the family to farm at Wardford and he aims to run a simple system that makes the most out of his time and assets.

Handling 950 ewes and their lambs

Colin buys all his replacement ewes from a single source aside from a small number which he breeds from his own flock. The ewes are bought in as gimmers and they are crossed with a Texel ram. The best female offspring are retained and crossed with a Suffolk ram while the rest of the lambs go to slaughter. The farm aims to bred prolific, good natured ewes.

“We find there’s a good demand from butchers for the Suffolk carcase as they have a good conformation,” Colin explains. “When it comes to proficiency we’d regularly scan upwards of 205% in the Mule ewes and 190% in the Texels.”

Given that the ewes scan at such high percentages lambing is always an exceptionally busy time on the farm. All ewes are bred to lamb down in a five-week period at the end of March. The large numbers of lambs being born in a short period of time means Colin needs to take on three students for lambing every year in addition to his own labour and his son James.

“We lamb at five different lambing stations as it’s just not possible to have everything in the one location given the number of ewes there are. That’s where the extra labour is vital because there’s no point having the high scanning rates if we can’t keep the lambs alive,” says Colin.

The students live on-site in a caravan and have their meals provided by Anne. Colin strives to make living and working conditions as comfortable as possible as he understands the importance of having good labour on hand.

“It’s getting very difficult to get good stock people nowadays. Most of our students come back for two or three years so there’s a high degree of continuity and they know the system.”

Key to establishing this continuity is to have the right system that is easy to operate. This way it is easier to get people to come back. This philosophy led the Presleys, four years ago, to invest in a Racewell automated handling unit.

Although it cost £12,000 at the time Colin has no regrets and points to it as the success of his sheep enterprise.

“I’d be lost without it if I’m honest,” he says. “It’s made handling sheep a one-man operation. It’s fitted with a clamp and turning crate for working with ewes, an EID reader, digital scales and a three-way drafting gate.”

For example, when drafting lambs for the factory Colin can enter preset weights so that when lambs enter the race those weighing 46kg or more are drafted one way for sale and all those that are too light are drafted back for more feeding.

Making the most of everything.

Colin also utilises the race when he is drafting the pigs he contract fattens for slaughter. The pigs arrive on farm weighing 33kg and leave once they are fit for slaughter. East Coast Viners, a breeding farm, provide the pigs as well as the feed while Colin provides the housing, straw bedding and meal bins. He is then paid a set price per pig.

In addition to making use of an idle shed throughout the year and the extra income, there is one other major benefit to keeping the pigs.

“The muck they’re producing is brilliant for increasing soil fertility,” Colin enthuses. “I put in the straw and they convert that to muck that I can then spread on the cereal ground and use to produce barley and more straw. The whole thing is very integrated.”

The farm gets through three batches in the year but takes a break at lambing when the shed is cleaned out and disinfected to house the lambing gimmers. The gimmers are lambed indoors so Colin can keep a closer eye on them while everything else is lambed as part of a just-in-time lambing system.

With grass making up such a large part of the diet for ewes it is important that the farm has a productive grazing platform. The farm has two main strategies to achieve this.

Firstly, of the 300ac of grass on the farm 100ac of it is used jointly with a neighbour’s cattle. It is something that they have practised for the last number of years where sheep enter a field first and graze down the sward. They are then moved on and cattle are moved in to clean it out better and get high-quality regrowth.

These good relations with neighbours translate through to the hired help on the farm too. Between Colin and one of his neighbours they hire in a worker to spend three days on one farm and two days on the other. This ensures that there is enough work and variation to satisfy the worker as well as making it possible to secure the part-time labour needed on both farms.

In addition to the joint grazing, in the last four years the farm has begun a reseeding programme. However, rather than ploughing fields in spring or autumn, Colin heavily stocks fields designated for reseeding and grazes out the sward tightly in November before stitching in the new seed mix. The mix is mainly clover with early- and late-heading varieties of grass.

“By direct drilling I can keep more of my grass in production,” Colin says. “I aim to do roughly 30 to 35ac a year and hopefully I’ll have all the ground reseeded within six years. The percentage of seed established will depend on frost-free weather but we usually achieve levels of 60 to 70%.”

Being a serial barley grower

Outside of the livestock operations the farm also produces 300ac of spring barley every year. Given the demands of lambing in the springtime the farm only sows in spring with harvest aimed for the relatively quiet period of autumn.

“Despite the wet weather we seem to have got a relatively good yield this year. Although the straw is still on the ground, all our grain is secure and the malting barley has passed the relevant tests.”

Growing spring barley also suits Colin’s land type. Half the farm is on stoney, free-draining ground that allows sheep to be stocked quite heavily while the less-stoney ground can be used to grow barley that produces the bedding for the ewes.