The month of January has gone in quickly for once I feel, with longer days letting us get stuck in with jobs that we had put aside in December due to everyone having the cold/flu.

We scanned our ewes this week and we are pleased with the results with a scanning percentage of 194% from 270 ewes put to the tup, with 2.5% empty, a slight improvement on last years’ barren percentage of 3.3% and an overall improvement from last years’ 181% scan.

I am not sure if this improvement is due to bolusing the ewes in the autumn or just related to grass availability and their condition at tupping. I am going to look into pricing pet lamb feeder options, as a two-teat shepherdess bucket is unlikely to have the capacity for the number of pets I’m probably going to have this year.

Post scanning, ewes have all received their annual ‘scabivax’ vaccination to help manage orf and homebred gimmers got their first heptavac-p, as they’d only had ovivac as lambs.

Single and twin bearing ewes have been shifted onto cover crops now to graze at a neighbouring farm and in three weeks time the twin bearing ewes will start receiving additional concentrate feed. Triplets and quads will stay closer to home on grass and will also receive concentrate feed.

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Utilising cover crops is excellent for helping us give our grass 100 day rest, thereby helping to give us early grass in the spring to turn ewes and lambs out on to, but boy is it a lot of work putting up and taking down electric fences. Even with our fence winding/unwinding machine on the back on the Gator, many kilometers have been walked this last week putting in and taking out posts, no need for a gym membership this January is one plus point though!

We are planning to grow five acres of fodder beet this year as a trial after attending a very interesting meeting last week on fodder beet run by the farm advisory service. Hopefully we can winter some of our ewes next year on fodder beet reducing the need for bought in concentrate with it being high in energy, and having sufficient protein to meet all the feed demands of the pregnant ewe.

On the arable front, Dad has been delivering some straw out and about, and I have bought some very expensive potash(£630/t), and took delivery of some very expensive spring barley base fertiliser.

It is a bit of a worry seeing grain prices drift downwards when input costs are even higher than they were this time last year, hopefully prices rise a bit over the coming months, but literally who knows what will happen?

Dad has spent the last few months reading every regenerative agriculture and soil book he can get his hands on and watching soil videos on youtube. We are both feeling pretty keen on trying to improve the soil structure and microbiome of our land with much of it in constant arable cropping for 30 + years which we feel has led to yield plateau.

Rotational grass with livestock and no-till drilling seem to be pretty key features in achieving this going by what the books say. We tried no-till before in a trial when we were a monitor farm and saw a definite drop in yield, but this was drilling directly into stubble in a field that had probably been in arable crops for 30 odd years, so maybe wasn’t a fair trial.

This time we are going to try direct drilling an arable crop into sprayed off grass and see if improving the ‘microbiome’ of the soil with the grass and sheep for a few years prior to drilling an arable crop in makes a difference. It will depend on the weather and if we have enough grass for the ewes whether we do this with a crop of spring barley this spring, or winter wheat in the autumn, and how brave we are feeling!