Field Margins' Neil McGowan talks Farm Genes and methane

Rainfall totals have got to 30 inches for the year to date, slightly wetter than normal, but if you ignore a very wet January, the measured rain is following the normal trend. It has been the catchy nature of the showers that has been the problem for getting on with a bit of second cut silage, with no two decent days together until lately.

A good spell of harvest weather thankfully coincided with spring barley and oats ripening, and a combine available. Straw took a few days to dry, and I then found myself in the very strange circumstance of phoning for a baler and being quite relaxed about waiting till tomorrow afternoon!

MORE NEWS | New risk aid for Johne's disease control

Neil McGowan has been catching up with livestock work after a busy on-farm sale MORE NEWS | Duncryne Houdini Texel lamb makes £40,000 in private deal

A tremendous spell of weather in a very settled forecast has made for good harvest conditions. Considering the poor winter, late spring and lack of sunshine, spring crops have yielded better than expected with good quality. Most straw bouts have been quite well filled with good opportunities for baling at the right time.

We lost some carry-over straw in a fire through the summer and haven’t been able to replace that quantity very easily. I think we’ll have enough to get by, but it has not been the bumper straw-harvest we could have done with. And talking to the combine folk, grain will be the same story.

Good conditions allowed a field of forage rye to get sown. This is a new crop for us, and we hope that it will allow for some good early grazing for ram hoggets coming out of the winter and needing a boost. The plan is to then direct-drill a forage crop, with the minimal disturbance helping with weed control. I was slightly taken a-back by the cost of the seed, but we’ll see how it works.

The weather-pattern made me a bit nervous about the ram sale. We landed at the start of the first good spell for a long time. However, the online bidding option has made it possible to view bulls and tups beforehand and we had quite a bit of interest at a couple of viewing days the week before. This is a more relaxed time for us and gives us a chance for a good chat and to get to the bottom of what people are looking for. Some people went to see the mothers of bulls, and others got to draw a pen of rams together to help sort their final choices.

It took us by surprise to get so many more folk turn up to the farm on sale day, which made for a great atmosphere and was a real boost for the whole team here.

Viewing days are in the middle of our preparations – trying to get rams reasonably clean, videos posted, and the steading tidied up. By sale day, there is no more to be done. There were a few bids already placed the night before, so we knew we’d be selling something and the edge was off the nerves. Our job becomes trying to help people find the right ram or bull for their own unique circumstance, helping point them in the right direction, and keeping people fed and happy.

It was an absolute pleasure to see the bulls laid out in the field, relaxing in the sunshine with a crowd of about 20 people wandering through them, poking them up for a better look.

Rams look good drawn into their sire-groups, and I group them into 2s and 3s that are similar types (and often ¾ or full brothers), to run them through the ring on a parade. We had a full ringside of studious stockmen, but the facebook live-feed of that show was popular with at-home bidders.

There are screens up on the wall with a list of the individual lots, which turn from red to blue once there is a bid. So, when the screen turns mostly blue, we know we’ve had a successful day. The bidding becomes more about who sorts out first pick and has very little to do with us. The whole screen went blue this year, and we are all very heartened by that and encouraged to get on with investing the time, effort, and thought into carrying the breeding programme forward.

We’ve got right back into it, with Texel lambs having a busy week. Ultrasound scanned for muscle and fat depth; the top 15 ram lambs went down to Edinburgh to go through the CT scanner. This gives a more accurate carcase quality measure, and who-knows one day perhaps will give us a useful pelvic-area proxy for lambing-ease.

The others have just gone through Portable Accumulation Chambers (PAC) to measure the methane they produce. Part of a Texel Society project, these lambs have also had a swab taken for DNA extraction which will lead to more accurate genomic ebvs. It is interesting to be involved in this research, but we have to keep focussed on what it’s all about – and for our meat sires, it is ‘adding value to the carcase, reducing time on-farm for the prime lamb, and causing no extra hassle for a busy shepherd’.

Talking about time on-farm, the May-born cross lambs were eating some very wet grass after weaning, but with this drier spell will need a draw out of them soon.

We have also just shipped some cull cows that didn’t go with the bull this spring and weaned their calves early. They came back at a tremendous trade but only up about £30 on the year. The top four cull Luing cows covered the average price at the bull sale, which was £6737 – which makes the value of a bull look fairly reasonable. Bluetongue is a bit of a worry. I’ve just been talking to a shepherd friend in southern Germany who has seen a bit of the disease but has now got most of his breeding stock vaccinated. He is at high altitude with very little stock around him and with some recent rough weather is fairly low risk. Further north there have been some big disasters. He has a friend with a 1200-ewe flock who lost 200 ewes before he got vaccinated, and then lost 700 lambs. And this isn’t a one-off case.

So we’d better look after our lambs, as it sounds like they’ll all be needed – and keep the North winds blowing.