Farmer focus: Deadweight fares better than liveweight
Bob and Kay Adam ©Angus Findlay The May bulls sales have past, and we are delighted to report, we have managed to do business with Sam Chesney, our fellow farmer focus writer from Northern Ireland.
He purchased our top Black Limousin bull at Carlisle for 6,200gns with an impressive set of figures including a maternal value of +33.
He’ll be ideal for breeding replacement females, and we wish Sam well with his new boy. We’re certain we’ll read about him in the future, good or bad!
See also: Selling livestock- is auction or abattoir best?
More than 560 pure Blackface and Cheviot lambs have been sold deadweight this year to Woodhead Brothers to an average of £86, with the majority grading out at U 3Hs and averaging 20.2kg cold weight.
Our final year grid ranged from six O grades at the bottom to 49 E grades at the top end, we also sold lambs live.
We are delighted with the deadweight grades and all costs taken into consideration the lambs marketed deadweight have paid the best this year.
Lambing is just about finished for another year, but the scanning results were a bit out.
We had about 20 extra sets of triplets arriving and, along with twins in the singles, this made extra work for shepherd Brian. Thankfully, most of the ewes have been fit enough to handle it.
No cattle are outside yet, but things are beginning to green up.
Empty large fields ready for cows have proved too tempting for some and we have had several visits from hare-coursing gangs driving straight into pastures and newly sown spring crops and letting their dogs run riot with the wildlife.
Sadly, the police haven’t managed to corner them and it seems to be happening more often.
All the calves have had a further injection of multivitamin. We now provide this at birth and turnout, following the sudden death of a strong 10-week-old calf.
The post-mortem result revealed white muscle disease and hopefully the additional injection at turnout will prevent any further losses.
We’re looking forward to one of the most enjoyable farming sights, getting the cows out to grass, hopefully soon.
Bob and Kay Adam run 100 pedigree Limousin and Charolais cows on their 222ha family farm in Angus and rent a 728ha hill farm running 640 ewes and 30 suckler cows.