Spring brings with it the optimism of a new season

Food for Thought by Victoria Ballantyne

Spring has sprung and is very welcome. After a long and cold winter, the sight of snowdrops and the emerging daffodils brings with it the optimism of a new season.

It is amazing what a difference just one decent week of weather can make. The grass has started growing and is greening up already. We recorded just 32mm of rain/snow here in February and the ground is drying up nicely after a wet January.

The cows are enjoying the drier weather and are making their way through the silage, straw and swedes. We will turn them out to the grass as soon as we can, hopefully at least a week before they are due to start calving on April 20.

Calves in the sheds are growing at 1.1kg/day and looking great. We will sell the Charolais X calves in the next month. Prices have been excellent so hopefully that trend will continue. The Angus, Stabiliser and Luing calves will be turned out to grass and sold either finished or as forward stores later in the year.

We have scanned the ewes with mixed results. Our home cross ewes and gimmers scanned well and are in excellent condition. The cross ewe lambs also scanned very well and we are interested to see what the lambs from our new Primera tups look like. Unfortunately we had one of the worst scans in our Cheviots for years, with a large number of empty gimmers. We were concerned about tup performance at the time and probably should have managed them better when the weather deteriorated in early January soon after the tups came out. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. The only consolation is that we had planned to reduce sheep numbers and they are making good money at the moment.

I have often thought that in this region the ideal ewe would have a six month gestation, rather than five. It would mean the tups could go out in late October when the weather is fine and grass is plentiful, but we could still lamb in mid-April when the days are longer and the grass has grown.

Maintenance work has begun and my priority is to ensure all the gates swing and open with ease. When you are using a gate several times a day during lambing, the last thing you need is extra work and frustration. We will also check all the fences, cut back greenery from electric wires, service machinery and order vet supplies.

It is also a good time to revise our animal health plan for the year and decide if we need to change the type of wormer we are using or look at different vaccination options. A paid consult with our vets is money well spent if it means we can reduce the risk of wormer resistance and also reduce our overall bills. We bought a microscope and testing kit at the end of last year so we can test for worm eggs quickly and make treatment decisions based on results. Lot of practice still needed but we’ve had welcome support from the Moredun Foundation.

There is a lot of interest at the moment in increasing grass sward species diversity to potentially improve both soil and animal health. I’ve attended a few webinars on the subject and we look forward to speaking with our seed suppliers as we have two fields to re-seed in May. There is undoubtedly a move away from mono-culture rye grass, but establishment and management of herbal leys is still a challenge.

Victoria and Jason Ballantyne run Clynelish Farm, Brora.

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