Like most farmers with livestock, we don’t take holidays as such over Christmas as we still have the usual everyday jobs, like checking ewes, putting hay out and moving the fence on swedes for lambs. But, we do try to do only essential jobs for a few weeks so we get a wee bit of a rest.
That being said, we did fluke a group of ewes over the festive period and put some lambs off to the mart. The two pens which both averaged out at 44.5kg sold at £110 and £119 per head.
We also got all the paperwork ready for our Scottish Quality Cereals and Quality Meat Scotland inspections on January 9.
We will also be doing the rest of our ewes for fluke and start giving our gimmers their first Heptavac-p injection this week.
Our ewes are being pregnancy scanned on Friday (today) too – always a nerve-wracking day. I am nervous to see how the horrendous autumn and winter weather has affected conception rates.
The weather has severely impacted grass availability here and we started feeding hay, bought in from two neighbours at the start of November. We have purchased 80 bales so far, and reckon we will need to buy another 20 or so to get us through to the end of February. Then, we will start feeding our good quality silage which has a dry matter of 452g/kg and an ME of 11.1 MJ/kg DM, as the ewes’ nutritional needs increase in late pregnancy.
We also have a hectare of fodder beet and will have swedes left over after the last 140 lambs go – hopefully in the next six weeks – which we can hopefully utilise for the ewes.
This week will also see our new employee start – recruited via a Facebook ad back in October – so we are really looking forward to having him on the farm. It is startling the number of farms both locally and further afield advertising for staff.
Our industry appears to be in a staffing crisis, with employers looking for workers from shepherds, to stock people, to sprayer operators, and everything in between. Hopefully, schemes like the Next Generation training fund will encourage more employers to take on employees from outside agriculture and inject new talent and skills into the sector.
Life has been quiet over the past month on the arable and contracting front. It’s been far too wet for us to do any ploughing, and we haven’t started dressing the 400t of C2 seed that we have in stock yet either so the next few months will be busy!
I ordered two lorry loads of spring barley base fertiliser before Christmas, a 10-11-30+S+OEP at £459/t, which is down by more than £300/t from what I paid for the same product last spring, so that is good. However, as usual, as fertiliser falls, so does the price of grain.
I have sold about 150t of spring barley forward for harvest 2024, at prices between £205/t + premium and £207/t + premium.
I haven’t sold any wheat, as we only managed to get 30 acres in the ground, of which five acres will definitely be getting ploughed up as it looks absolutely catastrophic, and isn’t worth investing fertiliser and chemicals in.
The remaining 25 acres actually look quite good, and we are glad we upped the seed rate at drilling time. This autumn we are definitely going to try and get our wheat in the ground much earlier, at the start of September, and hopefully get it off to a better start when the weather is milder, and hopefully drier.
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