Preparing stock and crops as winter nears
Autumn planting progressed well with all drilled up by October 23 into nice seedbeds, writes David Morgan. All the wheat is up and needs a dry spell so that we can apply some herbicide.
The oil seed rape has some huge leaves that will cope with some pigeon grazing; unfortunately the pigeons are grazing the one poor area with limited establishment and smaller weaker plants.
We are down to the last 92 lambs to finish, with plenty of forage and the lamb price finally moving upwards. On the last weighing the lambs had not put any weight on; I think they are suffering from a cobalt deficiency. Their fleeces have begun to open and the feel of the wool is drier than you'd expect. I also noticed one lamb with crusty ears and some with tear stains. While this is not conclusive proof of a deficiency I have decided that I will buy some drench this week and drench them every few weeks to keep them thriving.
We housed all the cattle last week and started using silage bales, which look great quality. I'll get some analysed early next week so that I can be more accurate with my rations. All the stock was run through our new weigh crush and the cows body condition scores noted. We then separated the first calvers and some poorer condition cows into two additional pens. These will be fed a better ration than the older condition three plus cows. I need to buy some rape meal to feed them so as to balance the straw, another job for next week.
Lloyd Jones, our vet, came and pregnancy diagnosed our 19 month old heifers. Good news – we have 12 in-calf to the AI bull "Weighton Wold Merlin" and only three empty heifers. I had feared that we might have only had half of them in calf to the AI due to lower conception rates with its use.
We changed the raddle crayons for the second time on the ram's harnesses last Thursday – day 14. We counted 382 out of the 407 that were put to the rams. If none return to service we are going to have a nicely condensed lambing next April. The two and three year old ewes have been grazing in too much grass so I'm a little concerned that we may end up with too many lambs from them.
Kim is busy at school preparing art scholars for the potential new schools, a mammoth 18 pupils this year. Oscar is constantly developing with more vocabulary being added to his farm-related early words, like tractor, quad bike, combine, sheep, do do (horse), doggy and so on. He has learnt his primary colours from a tractor book with different coloured tractors.
