The fun is just about to begin for John Anderson

A burst of sunshine throughout the first half of August has done wonders for crops and has come at a good time to fill out the barley which should be ready for the combine in the next few days.

The poor weather of June and July, however, has taken its toll on the growth performance of both lambs and calves. There just hasn’t been the push in the grass to make things move even though there has been plenty of it.

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Male calves kept entire and finished on bought in cereals have been a winner

As the harvest in the southern half of the UK comes to an end, preparations for the start of ours have begun. Both sheds and machinery are undergoing an overhaul. The biggest improvement to be undertaken this year is fitting rubber liners to reline the 30-year-old valley gutters in both our grain stores. One of the gutters sprung a leak in the winter of last year, putting around 600t of oats on long-term storage at risk. Thankfully the problem was noticed early on and disaster was averted.

Note to self for building future grain stores : Valley gutters and grain storage should not be uttered in the same sentence!

With our harvest preparations, when moving some forward bought fertiliser to its winter storage, hiding in behind it I found all eight bags of our long-forgotten wool clip. Normally this would have been sent away immediately after clipping but with wool prices where they have been in recent years, I assume the enthusiasm to cash in the commodity must have waned. Nevertheless I have loaded it onto a trailer destined for the collection centre as a way of disposing of it more than anything else. While the older generation talk of times when the wool cheque had the ability to pay their farm’s rent, this year’s cheque will only cover feeding the clipping squad. If I’m lucky it might pay for the petrol the generator used as well.

That aside, there is really little to complain about in the world of sheep at the moment. Thoughts now turn to what way we should market this year’s lambs. The normal system is to finish our May-born lambs on forage crops throughout October/November and although we have sown forage rape once again, it is extremely tempting to cash them in as stores.

This is often a dilemma that is gone through at this time of year but I think this year it’s rather more profound. Reading the sale reports of store sales, auctioneers must be running out of adjectives to use to describe the trade.

Talking of dilemmas, another annual decision that is often pondered is whether to keep male calves entire or not. The bull beef job is something we have dipped in and out of over the years, depending on the price of feed barley. When the price of 10-month-old Charolais stots is factored in, plus the extra concentrates it takes to finish a bull, there is often not much difference in margin.

However, it is safe to say that for last year’s crop of calves, bulls have certainly been the winner. Around 50% of male calves were kept entire last year and around half of them have been put away to date with the rest due to go over the next month.

With all our homegrown barley on malting contracts, feed barley is all bought in and although the feed barley price is currently on the floor, it was not particularly easy to come by locally over the summer before the local winter barley harvest commenced.

On the subject of grain, with all our oats and barley grown on contracts that are based on premiums over wheat futures, I can’t help but think that our grain is going to be undervalued this year. The grain futures markets are very focused on supply issues around the world as opposed to our domestic supply.

This is nothing new but looking at the amount of arable land in England going into SFI options, coupled with relatively poor yields across Europe, it will be interesting to see what feed grain will be worth in the spring.

Something that doesn’t seem to be undervalued in the arable world at present is straw with some astronomical prices being paid across the country. We won’t be in the market to capitalise on this much as we have repeat customers who take our straw every year. Straw may well be plentiful again in future years and we need to rely on these straw buyers to help us out in the years when you can’t give straw away.

Of course, it’s all worth nothing until it’s in the shed and here’s hoping for an Indian summer to gather it all in. That just leaves me to wish everyone a safe harvest (or at least what’s left of it). For us, the fun is just about to begin.