Farmer Focus: Blaming excess lambs for disappointing scan
Scanning was a disappointing affair. The Romneys managed 160%, which is about 15% lower than my brother and father.
Yet again I am holding the wooden spoon for the family.
We achieved 3% empties, but ewe nutrition was off-point over the autumn and winter. This is because we were carrying a lot more lambs than we should have ideally had.
See also: CT scanning set to influence terminal and maternal traits
Ewe body condition is also not great, so we are taking measures to try to raise a body condition score across the flock.
Jo is on a one-woman mission to improve our grassland management, so we will be busy in early spring splitting fields into smaller areas, repositioning water troughs, and starting rotational grazing.
We have also worked closely with our vets to come up with a new flock health plan to tackle our increasing worm burden.
We have made a few mistakes over the past couple of years. It’s time to roll out some lessons learnt so we don’t repeat them.
As we mentioned last month, we had 120ha (300 acres) that were dry enough to attempt to drill.
We briefly considered direct drilling into the cover crops but decided to go a different way.
We were able to get hold of anaerobic digester waste and so we spread that on the stubble.
But with the compaction that caused, it was clear direct drilling was not an option, so we decided to go with a more traditional plough and drill.
Unfortunately, we only have one tractor capable of pulling both the plough and the drill, so we had a couple of weeks of very long hours trying to get it all in before the rain came in (again big thanks to Ben for putting in long hours on the tractor).
That ground was all destined to be spring barley and has now gone into winter oats and wheat.
It will be interesting to see how it compares to the winter crops sown in October that has lain wet for months.