Apart from an occasional visit to Stirling to buy a Charolais bull, I don’t get many opportunities to go to a mart, which is a shame, as it’s good to get your head up out of the berry tunnels and speak to your peers occasionally.

So the annual pilgrimage to Newcastleton (known locally as the Holm) to buy Blue-Grey heifers at the end of October is a real treat. It is a bit like stepping back in time. The lack of mobile phone signal, the old wooden ring with its tin roof and hole in the middle to let in the light (and let out the steam) and the old wooden pens add to the atmosphere.

Even the clothing everyone wears is subdued and practical, as it is often misty and murky. If it wasn’t for the warmth and open friendliness of all the folk there, you might think you had stumbled onto the set of one of those horror movies like Sleepy Hollow, but luckily there are no headless horsemen here.

There are many old friends both buying and selling, however, and it’s always good to catch up with them, although one old stalwart from the Bloch was sadly missing. His son and grandson were still there however, as were the next generation of most of the buyers and sellers, so there is reason to believe that the future of Blue-Greys is assured. This is good news for us, as we are big fans.

My father stumbled into the ‘breed’ about 25 years ago quite by accident.

He used to buy Galloways at Castle Douglas, but one year the price shot up from £200 to £1000 as there was a lot of interest from Germany, so instead he picked up 20 surplus in-calf heifers from William Stewart, at Bartlehill, for about £180.

You would have needed a much bigger budget this year. In-calf heifers made £1400-1600, 16-20 month old heifers £950-£1400, and heifer calves 5-8 months old £600-£820.

We managed to pick up 21 bulling heifers at an average price of £1150, which is not expensive when they will each give us nine calves on average and be worth as much as £800 at the end of their life.

We have 100 autumn calvers, which spend the summer in the Highlands of Glen Lyon, and 80 spring calvers at home. The calves are vigorous at birth, and although we use Charolais bulls with big EBVs, nearly all calve themselves thanks to the wide pelvic area on this hybrid cow.

A few years ago we started to feed the spring calvers soya meal in the month before calving . It is well known that soya promotes milkiness and vigorous lambs with sheep and I am convinced it works with cows too.

The autumn cows and calves winter outside on grass and strip grazed kale with 2kg of concentrate and ad-lib straw. The calves are creep fed.

We almost never have a pneumonia or a scour.

The Blue-Grey is able to rear a big calf from a small cow, which makes them the equivalent of a Subaru Impreza if you like car analogies, or a Stuart Hogg if you’re more of a rugby fan. Our cows only weigh around 525 kg, but the calves average more than 300kg at weaning.

One thing the BES interim report identified is that one of the crucial ways to profitability in beef is to finish as quickly as possible and I think we are about right with the bull calves, but have some work to do with the heifers.

We finish all of our calves and there is some variation, but the bulls average 350 kg DW at 13.5 months. The heifers are a bit slower as they go too fat if we try to force them too much. They average 275kg DW at 15.5 months.

The top third are significantly better, however the bulls finishing three weeks earlier and giving 34kg more and the heifers show similar differences, so there is significant potential for improvement on the average. I have spent quite a lot of time on home made spreadsheets looking at cow performance and trying to identify which cows are significantly outperforming the others. It is fair to say it’s a work in progress.

That is one of the reasons the aims of the BES makes sense to me.

Hopefully, all this work on genomics will bear fruit. The other one is that I get paid £32 per calf for putting a tag in 20% of my calves and we don’t really have to do anything else we wouldn’t be doing anyway.

We did all of ours in a few hours and it is not onerous. I can’t understand why everyone has not signed up, regardless of how useful they think it will be.

One thing that would make a huge difference to the profitability of our beef enterprise would be if all of our calves were bulls. An analysis done by Gavin Hill, of SRUC, showed us that the difference in nett margin between a bull and a heifer for us is £180.

The dairy industry uses sexed semen regularly but it is not currently economically viable in the beef industry. For us, it wouldn’t be practical unless we could synchronise our cows in batches and we didn’t manage to synchronise our heifers when we tried it years ago. You would also still need a bull to clean up ¬– however, maybe at some point in the future this might be a technology available to us?

Driverless cars are another technology that is long overdue for narcoleptics like me. 

I usually drive down to Newcastleton, but I do have a tendency to fall asleep at inappropriate moments, so on the return journey I handed over the wheel to my friend and neighbour.

He drives like an absolute maniac, but he was still a safer option than me. There is a story about the chap who said he would rather die peacefully in his sleep like his grandfather, and not screaming in terror like the passengers in his grandfather’s car.

I didn’t have to watch much anyway – I slept most of the way home.