Farmer Focus: Poor cereals harvest offset by cracking pigs
Jack Bosworth © MAG/Colin Miller Harvest finished for us on 8 August, and it’s fair to say that yields dropped off as we got further into it, with our continuous wheats in their eighth year returning a very poor 6.9t/ha.
Spring barley was also disappointing, yielding 6.1t/ha.
The consequence of these poorer yields will be, based on today’s prices, another circa £100k required to purchase wheat and barley to see us through to harvest 2026. (When we commit to that purchase is another matter.)
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Cultivations and other works continue, including slurry being applied to barley stubbles, with buckwheat and oilseed rape going in behind it.
Elsewhere, on the pigs we have had visits from our vet, nutritionist and research centre.
A good vet report from Joe Lunt has followed, with a lot of praise for gilt development where we are seeing improvements in litter size, particularly in those weighing 160-170kg at service.
Average liveborn a gilt a year has been 36.15 for the past three months, compared with 30.55 for the previous three months.
A massive “well done” to Gemma (who brings the gilts through) and Alex (for looking after them at farrowing), with both meeting in between for serving and the gestation period.
Our nutritionist, Andrew Zarkos-Smith, came to have a look around, discuss any feedback and collect some samples for dispersion tests and raw material quality specification.
Protein in the feed wheat samples averaged 11.45% which we are very happy with; feed barley averaged 9.95%.
Andrew is now adjusting formulas to reflect the quality difference between harvest 2025 and 2024 cereals, and other raw materials such as the cold-pressed rapemeal (this is higher in oil than expected, based on what has been found at previous analysis).
Towards the end of August, we had Emma Baxter from Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) visit the unit to carry out body condition scoring as part of a project we are involved in with SRUC, Agsenze and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).
They scored 197 animals (all pregnant gilts and some low-parity sows), and came up with an average score of 3.0 – this is ideal.
Then we had an average body condition caliper measurement of 14.55 – with the range for ideal being 13 to 15. So our results have come back pretty much perfect, confirming that the whole farm team (including Joe and Andrew) are doing a terrific job.