Farmer Focus Livestock: Robert Neill’s new calf pens are a success
Calving is well under way and the new calving pens we were working on are now up and running, and we are pleased with them.
Now we are hoping the weather will be kind to us over the coming weeks to allow us to turn the cows and calves out. Straw is going to be tight otherwise, having lost 50 acres of it to the flood waters last harvest.
The drier weather enabled us to spread the rest of the farmyard manure on to 180 acres of stubble. These fields are now being ploughed for spring barley on contract for malting. We just hope the manure doesn’t lift the nitrogen levels above the threshold for malting. Because of the increased acreages of spring barley being sown this year, the maltsters will possibly be flooded with malting barley and, of course, they will move the goalposts as they see fit.
Other arable work is now under way, with the beans being the first crop to be sown. This should provide us with the protein for our feeding mix for next year.
We recently had a trip to a machinery sale in Forfar. We were looking for a set of discs, which we managed to buy at a reasonable price. Some of the permanent pasture needs to be rejuvenated. We removed some whin bushes last year and haven’t re-seeded the bare areas. Rather than ploughing the fields, we plan to use the discs on the rough areas so we can re-seed. Some of these fields are prone to producing stones, a crop that cannot generate much income.
A successful round of bidding on eBay for a caravan saw me setting off to Essex to collect it in a 685 mile round trip. That should be the family holidays sorted for the next few years.
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