Finally we hope we have got to the bottom of the feed problems and time will tell with regular weighings of the animals showing us if performance has got back on track or not!   

It’s a little like the lull before the storm as calving is due to start on March 1st and lots of them are bursting at the seams.   Trisha decided she couldn’t wait any longer so Bomber is the first calf of the year and he is living up to his name already giving his mother the run round.  

Work begins in earnest now on the show cattle for this year although they have been in the five star hotel for a few months now!   

We are currently in the spring sale season in the cattle world and I watched one bull sell for 72,000 guineas the other week with many more high prices so at least some people have confidence in the British Beef industry.

We should have been able to get on with the first of the years arable field work but unless we swap a tractor for a hover craft, it’s not looking likely any time soon.   

Well what a winter it’s become, snow followed by rain followed by hard frosts it’s been a non –stop roller coaster and spring seems a long way off.

We are still having issues with the cattle feed and performance is down because of the problems.   We are adjusting things on a weekly basis and hope that before long we can get the weight gains back on track as we need to move some cattle out of the system in time for calving the next ones.

Were now into the old winter routine, with 400 head of cattle housed together with 200 pigs it takes most of the day just feeding, bedding and making sure everything is feeling well or attending to anyone who isn’t.   

We have had to call in our cattle nutritionist David Hendy who we rely on for his expertise because we have been having trouble with some of the cattle not eating as much as they should be and hence not growing at the rate we require them too.

He was soon able to pin point the problem, the maize silage has come in too dry after it was caught in the drought of September and matured much quicker than normal.   Finding an easy solution hasn’t been as easy as we would have liked and we have had to alter the cattle diets far more than normal, resorting for the first time in 40 years of feeding fodder beet which is a root crop similar to sugar beet and also a by product of the brewery industry pot ale syrup.   Feeding is now a very sticky affair but the combination of sugars from these new feeds has begun to increase the cattle’s appetites and we hope to soon see the desired effect.

Thanks to all of you who braved the snow and came in to the shop over the Christmas period – we had a fantastic trade for December and have had some great feedback from you all so thank you and we look forward to seeing you all again soon.

And then the rains came............ Cows have had to be housed quickly as they have started to make quite a mess on the wet fields. With cows in under cover we have had a few sleepless nights in one way or another, the autumn calvers have got on with the job in double quick time and we have had an unprecedented number of twins so the cows are tearing their hair out trying to cope with their double troubles and we are doing our best to give them the help they need.

At the same time we have weaned all of the calves born in spring and after a few days adjusting to the new situation the calves soon get on with life and their growth through the next few months will be very rapid.

On the pig front life has been very quiet, almost too quiet as a number of the sows seem to have taken an extended summer holiday and piglet production seems low on their list of priorities.   I have instructed Dan the pig expert to have a stern chat with them all, failing that ...............

First off for the month after a friendly tip off came a quick trip to Ireland.   A potential new bull had been spotted at a show and was up for sale.   I’m pleased to say he lived up to expectations and after a bidding war his purchase was secured and we look forward to his arrival back home in the next couple of months.    We can only hope he lives up to his name, ‘World Class’!   While at the same sale a little heifer was spotted and also purchased so ‘Adorable’ will be joining World Class on the trip over from the Emerald Isle and we have high hopes for her too.

Clonagh Adorable

No sooner back on the farm and after some welcome rain we were able to press on with the arable work and get 500 acres of crops drilled and 2000 tonnes of Maize silage in the clamp ready to feed the cows for the winter months.

Swift progress meant I could find the time to attend the world famous Perth Bull Sales, although this time not at Perth but in its new home of Stirling in Scotland.  

With another new bull required we eventually found one we liked but unfortunately we weren’t the only ones who liked him so £11,500 later he has arrived here at his new home.   Billy is his nick name and he will soon be off to work to try to recoup some of the investment.

Grangewood William

You may have guessed by now that we farmers are obsessed by the weather.  Unfortunately it is one large element that affects the profitability of our farms that is way beyond our control!    Harvest seemed a prolonged affair this year, very much due to the wet weather in August but boy hasn’t it changed now!

Although the Oilseed Rape crop for next year is in the ground and growing away already we should now be flat out preparing the ground and drilling next year’s crops but that all on stop dare I say it......we are waiting for rain as our supposedly lovely seedbeds now resemble something you might call lumps of concrete.

We have come to the stage where no matter how much we bash the soil with very large machinery we are making no progress so that’s it, we are downing tools, admitting defeating and waiting for rain.....

My patience has been put to the test with a wet start to the month and bad memories of last year’s harvest, but a little patience has paid off and I have been able to get the combine rolling at speed.......well 4.5km an hour anyway! The peas yielded well with a sample suitable for the micronizing trade they were grown for (not as easy as it sounds)  

From peas we moved into combining wheat, firstly milling wheat all destined for bread making flour production and secondly what we term as feed wheat which are, varieties of wheat with a lower specification than that of bread making wheat but with better yield potential. On the whole wheat has yielded well except were the land is on gravel as this suffered badly during the long dry periods we had of early summer and instead of yielding 4 tonnes to an acre these areas struggled to produce 2.5 tonne an acre.  Due to global commodity markets, the price we receive for wheat is down year on year £60 per tonne so in order for us to try and break even leave alone make a profit, yield is crucial.

Approaching the end of August we have just finished the wheat and have left only some Spring Barley and some Beans to harvest, but we have stopped combining to plant next year’s Oilseed Rape crop as it needs to be in the ground 11 months to hope to achieve a reasonable yielding crop. The drilling process is quite a precise exercise with only 2 kg of seed required to drill an acre and a 25kg bag of seed costs £300/bag. 

The last ever Royal Show has come and gone and I for one am saddened by its demise, due I am certain to complete mis-management. I have been attending the Royal show for 30 years now and for many, many years it has been the highlight of the year for a large number of like-minded stock loving farmers all desperate to win a coveted rosette at the Royal Show because it made all your efforts worthwhile. We took five cattle this year and they all did well, Perrywood Wispa being the star of the team, going very close to winning a very strong class but in the end we had to settle for second with her.   

With a couple of days at home we were off again this time heading north to the Great Yorkshire Show, one of the best shows in the calendar and one well worth a visit. We had a terrific show with Wispa doing really well, winning her class and becoming reserve female champion and reserve junior champion, as well as Winston and Tory both winning seconds.

Winston has now made a permanent move north, only a lot further than Yorkshire. He has gone to Aberdeenshire to become the stock bull in a pedigree herd of cows so I am sure he will enjoy his new job!

A return from Yorkshire Show brought on the worst job of the year on the farm by my reckoning, corn barn cleaning! It takes a full week every July for three of us to spring clean all of the barns we use to store corn including a mammoth dusting session and at the end of it we have an inspection from the Farm assurance inspector. Fail the inspection and we can’t sell this year’s crop so it’s a must do job!  

After a damp start we managed to get harvest started in the last week of the month with Oilseed Rape first up. Yield was not unexpectedly disappointing, it’s been a tricky year for the crop and it struggled to cope. We will now move on to peas and fingers crossed yields improve.

With the cows very contented out grazing for the summer, I would love to think June would be one of the most relaxing months of the year but it never ends up that way! We have been glued to tractor seats for hours, silaging and spraying with most of the crops receiving their last fungicide and insecticide spray before harvesting occurs in August.  

The yield of our grass silage is very disappointing this year with a 50% drop in yield due we think to a cold spring and lack of rain at critical points of the growing season. Rather than let the grass go stale in the hope it will bulk up with more rain, we have cut and cleared the silage grasses and hope to see the fields produce a much better second cut of silage later in the year. The consolation prize for the cows is that we have never had a better crop of maize (sweetcorn), so one way or another the silage clamps will be full come the autumn!  

The show cattle are all taking it easy after they returned from Herts Show and although we were unable - due to silage making - to take them to the South of England Show, we have still been giving them a weekly wash and blow dry in preparation for the Royal show next month.

With cows turned out and calving nearly over I am pleased to say that calves are growing rapidly. Many of them will be gaining 2 kilograms a day and they are at a stage where you can almost watch them grow!

We have been busy selling many of last year’s calves with a lot of the year old bulls now off to new homes to begin their careers as breeding bulls for other farmers. During this month we have sold cattle to new homes all over England and we wish their purchasers all the best with them.

Each year we take some of our cattle to shows all over the country to compete against other breeders. May sees our first show of the year so we have been busy halter training the show cattle as well as washing, blow drying and clipping them. My nephew, eight year old Ben has been practising with his calf Amy every day after school for his young handler’s classes and is getting on very well.

The final application of nitrogen feed for the crops has now taken place which always means harvest will be with us sooner than we think, although it’s now a critical time to monitor the crops for unwanted bugs and weeds.

Hertfordshire County Show saw a mammoth effort by everyone who works here made worthwhile because we had a very successful weekend. The cattle we took did well winning the Interbreed Pairs competition and three second prizes and Ben also won 2^nd prize against some very good competition with Amy in the young handlers class.  

On the meat side we made over half a ton of sausages and sold out together with a full range of our meats. Thank you to all who visited our stand at the show.  

Possibly the happiest animals on the farm at the moment are Pluto and Nomad, two of our breeding bulls. Both have just been turned out with 45 cows each to produce next year’s calf crop and with just nine weeks given to them to do the business the pressure is on, but I am sure they will enjoy the challenge! 

The months of March and April are dominated on the farm by Calving time. With more than 90 calves due in 9 weeks it’s a busy time in the maternity unit with cows being checked every two hours day and night. The vast majority of the cows calve of their own with no assistance, but just in case we are on standby to solve any problems that may crop up with the more complicated births.  

One of the highlights for visitors to the shop on a busy Saturday morning in early April was the arrival of eight calves within two hours all on view for people to watch. As well as the calves, April saw the arrival of two new litters of piglets. These two sows are both British Lops and had very good litters, an 18 and a 17!

With spring in the air lots of work has to be done to the crops on the farm with nitrogen applied to feed the crops and sprays having to be applied to control the large volume of weeds now appearing.   April also saw the completion of the years seeding programme with Barley, Peas, Beans and Sweet corn all planted to join the crops that were drilled in the autumn (Wheat and Oilseed Rape).

Other jobs completed include fencing maintenance in preparation for the cows going out to grass which is easier said than done when we have approx 10 miles of barbed wire fences and hedges to look after!