Farmer Focus: Late rains come but lambs are six weeks behind
Rob Hodgkins © Tim Scrivener It’s been the rise of the contractors round here recently. It sounds like a Star Wars film but is actually a comment on our lives at present.
We owe huge thanks to our friends in the area for stepping in and helping while we recruit new staff.
Ben Ballace has been outstanding, having been dropped on to our Mzuri drill with a telehandler and seed, and been told to “just keep going”.
See also: How to set up electric fencing to optimise grazing
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Late rains have given an incredible flush of blackgrass. Drilling has been delayed until the last moment to try and get on top of it.
Our already frantic work pace has turned extreme of late.
To tackle the blackgrass issue, we have tried more chemical brews than a 17-year-old at Glastonbury.
Some big doses of pre-emergence herbicide combined with Avadex have upped our chemical spend, but we hope to get blackgrass/wild oat populations back well under control.
The inter-row hoe will also be steaming through the winter cropping to pull out anything the chemicals don’t kill.
On the sheep side, we have had 140 lambs away now and another 100 leaving next week. The drought has probably pushed us six weeks later.
The late rain has saved the cover crops. Things have gone from famine to feast.
There have been some panicked phone calls to Rappa Fencing to try and get some more fencing gear across here as soon as possible.
We owe a big thanks to James Edwards for coming down and helping get the sheep under control.
We now have pretty much all lambs and ewes sorted into weight groups and they are all munching comfortably on cover crops or grass.
We are preparing the dairy and have got in Arran Johnson and Tomas Ifan from Wales. They are doing an amazing job getting the fencing finished off and paddocks sub-divided.
They got 2,000m up in the first week, although unfortunately, they have now run out of posts. We hope more will arrive in the country in the middle of November so they can finish it off.
Our regular staff member Jamie needs big thanks.
He switched from drilling to spraying to rolling to sheep chasing, and then electric fencing, without a single moan – and kept a big smile on his face.