By Jim Logan

 

It’s often not until we take a step back, slow down and relax a little that we realise what a busy life we as farmers, stockmen and farmworkers all lead.

I always feel that August is the busiest month of the year at Pirntaton, with us juggling a multitude of big tasks that all require a great deal of thought as we go along. Springtime may require slightly longer hours, but the routine of lambing etc seems to take so much less planning; it’s just a case of head down and get on with it.

Writing this with a glass of wine and looking out over the beautiful Solway coast, towards the end of a week’s holiday, has let me appreciate how much work the team has got through and just as importantly, how important this 'downtime' is for the wellbeing of everyone.

Recent years have seen us insisting that our employees take the vast majority of their annual leave as proper time away from work and have also implemented a strict weekend rota for most of the year. Although it can take a bit of working around, I feel that the result is a much more content and productive team. I see no other way, that as an industry, we are going to attract and keep hold of the smart and skilled youngsters we so desperately need, especially with the talk of a four-day working week in other industries being touted by many. Perhaps we should practice what we preach a little more as far as our own time away is concerned, but Rome wasn’t built in a day!

The arable silage experiment generally seems to have been a success, with us harvesting just under 15 bales of, hopefully, high quality feed per hectare and the young grass below it being well established. The plan is that this silage will be able to satisfy all the nutritional needs of our weaned beef calves over winter, and enable us to cut out, or at least drastically reduce the purchased feed element of their diet. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing how the 2ha of 'day nettle silage' analyse and feed! We have ended up with more than 1200 bales of silage of various qualities, over and above the crop ensiled. This should see us coming out of the coming winter with a bit in reserve again. The best quality grass silage has been set aside for our weaned deer calves, again hopefully negating the need for costly purchased feed.

In a further attempt to cut costs and labour we have set up a free-draining field, earmarked for winter crop next year, to bale graze our 40 youngest breeding cattle. Bales are already set up for daily shifts without the need for machinery to be back in the field, which along with a significant un-grazed buffer strip, should see any run-off and soil damage kept to a minimum.

Like many, some of our cattle housing is coming towards the end of its useful life, without considerable reinvestment. Unfortunately, the economics and the uncertain future of suckler beef production, make such an investment look questionable now, and perhaps for the considerable future. We are lucky in that our land and soil type allow us to consider out-wintering as a viable option for most of our stock classes, potentially lowering our fixed costs considerably, if we can make it work.

As I’ve alluded to before, without selling or shifting a significant number of stock units through the months of August and September we can quite quickly start eating into winter stocks of pasture. Our feed demand overtakes grass growth, usually around the end of the first week in September, and we need to weigh up carefully the cost/benefit of using the available feed to add more weight to our trading stock, rather than saving it to feed to our breeding stock going into winter.

As suggested in my last article, we made the decision not to spend the money on a final load of nitrogen for the season. The saying that you can 'buy gold too dear' seemed quite apt; with the price of nitrogen at the level it is, and a likely response of only around 10kgDM/kgN, the resultant extra grass produced would come at a cost of over 11p/kgDM. It seems to me that the fertiliser manufacturers are doing as much as anybody to bring about the huge decrease in artificial nitrogen use and the implementation of more organic alternatives that are touted as targets for the future.

This decision did however necessitate that we managed to offload a significant amount of stock. In upland areas of the country, such as ours, the practice of our forefathers selling most of their production at this time of year makes more and more sense to me.

And so, we went on a marketing spree. One manic 10-day period saw us selling and shifting four 'decker loads' of stock, consisting of finished deer, store cattle, cast ewes, store and finished lambs, as well as selling the majority of our 80 home-bred shearling Texel and Suffolk rams and 50 Wairere Romneys.

The selling of our first full load of finished deer was a bit of a landmark, and finally sees us recoup a meaningful portion of the set-up costs that have been accumulating since our decision to enter the sector in early 2017. Another load by the beginning of early October will further offset those costs.

Yearling cattle had grown on well at 1.1kg/day on pasture alone since turnout and were sold as a single batch for further finishing on a forage only system. We really look forward to seeing how our genetics can perform in that type of system.

What has become clearer over the last few years has been the realisation of the power and importance of social media and of having a good website in our type of business. Their ability to help with the marketing of stock and of keeping our customers, both existing and potential, informed about what we are doing, and of what we have for sale is phenomenal.

A strong social media presence takes effort over the whole 12 months of the year; the results and the relationships built are more than worth it. Decent photographs, videos and a bit of informative narrative go a long way to getting our message over. We are particularly pleased with how our ram sales have gone, with a huge number of repeat customers and several new ones to soak up our increased numbers. Most pleasingly, is the fact that so many of these customers, new and old, have the faith to allow us to select rams for them, that we think will fit into their systems, un-seen.

One of the final jobs before leaving on holiday was the de-antlering of our senior stags. Even four years on, I am still in awe at the size, power and beauty of these magnificent animals. Their antler growth is some of the fastest growing mammalian tissue in the world and it is quite astonishing to watch it develop each year. At the end of a nerve-wracking morning, we could be satisfied that both their and our lives would be considerably safer from now until the end of the rut. Their majesty may be dimmed but certainly not extinguished.