Late spring and early summer is a great time to reflect on the performance of sucklers and sheep, with success at calving and lambing self-evidently defining our potential financial performance of the business for the year ahead.

With just a handful of cows yet to calve out of the 600-odd we started with, Michael, Stuart and the team will be pretty relieved it is almost over.

The highlight of calving was the speed it happened, the quality of the calf crop – which, in the main, is excellent – and disease control during this hectic period.

To be able to control disease, especially with a fair number of bought-in animals introduced to the herd in the last couple of years, is very challenging. This is made even more challenging by the fact that we calve everything inside and keep them in until mid-May.

Hygiene and biosecurity are absolutely key to this working, and it is a credit to the guys that this year it was first class. Apart from a bit of navel ill at our new unit, which we have plans to sort out for another year, the rest of the disease control during and after calving has worked well.

The only real issue we had was too many caesarean sections in two groups. One group was our own two-year-old heifers, where we took a chance of bulling some that were a bit young and immature.

But increasing numbers and culling hard to tighten up the calving pattern at the same time meant this calculated risk was taken – it almost paid off.

The other group was a herd of cows we bought in for the new unit. The heifers calved really easily, but some of the cows decided to produce small elephants for some reason.

The work ‘freak’ was used a little too often for all our liking, as 70-odd kg calves were hauled out of the ‘side door’.

The good news is, all the calves and almost all the cows made it but our local vets are now all heading for the Caribbean for their holidays with us as their main sponsor!

Hopefully, we now have a full stock of cows and a lot of well-grown heifers, so hopefully these events will be ‘one offs’.

The tight calving has also seen nearly 400 cows and heifers AI’d or bulled already, so next spring looks set to be busy already!!

As for the lambing, like many others I have spoken to, we have had a record lamb crop. The scanning percentages were big and apart from too many casualties with twin lamb disease and prolapses as a result of this big scanning, the lambing went pretty well.

Our tick problem remains, but treating the lambs before they went back to the hill post-lambing after treating the ewes pre-lambing seems to be doing the trick. We will use pour on when they are dosed and vaccinated for clostridial diseases shortly.

The only new issue to pop up was in a bunch of Blackface gimmers. There were too many barren at scanning – a perennial problem it would seem – followed by a number of twins, with one dead one alive at birth.

The dead one of the pair had a swelling under it’s chin which was diagnosed by the vet lab as iodine deficiency. So, iodine boluses will be added to the list of preventative treatments for Blackie gimmers next year.

I like the breed, but anyone who claims they are as hardy as they used to be is dreaming, quite simply they are not. I’m sure this will be a combination of things from genetics, to nutrition, to other particular environmental conditions on different farms or even different parts of farms.

Whatever the reason, the idea of a dog and a stick to look after hill sheep that I was brought up with is a distant fading memory.

Anyway, for now the Texels, Mules and Blackie lambs are all on the thrive and, with recent rain and heat forecast in the coming days, the grass is growing for fun – so prospects for the lamb crop look promising.

That’s more than can be said for the performance of the Scottish Government in delivering much needed and overdue support to most of Scotland’s farmers.

I have run out of adjectives that are printable to describe the ongoing chaos in ScotGov in this regard. The admission last week that apparently only 40% of the total value of the 2016 EU support payments have been paid out to Scotland’s farmers is shocking, disgraceful and, frankly, completely unacceptable.

It is no comfort that the latest cobbled together loan scheme for LFASS in Scotland is staggering into life and paying some claimants 90% of what they would normally expect to receive in February or March.

Beef Calf Scheme money is nowhere to be seen and the much criticised Beef Efficiency Scheme is falling apart in front of our eyes, with no leadership, direction or clearly defined outcomes. It must be knackered, as even some of its biggest cheerleaders like former NFUS president, Nigel Miller, is publicly criticising the shambles it has predictably become. The silence from Jim McLaren is deafening.

In our own case, we have abandoned BES but still get correspondence and threatening letters about it as if we were still taking part.

Our LFASS loan has been restricted to our 2015 claim, not the 2016 claim, because the 2016 claim has still not been verified. The reason for this is that the entitlements that I applied to transfer 14 months ago still haven’t been verified.

The Stornoway office who seem to have drawn the short straw to try and sort this debacle, tell me the IT programme that Edinburgh thought was working three weeks ago to enable these transfers to take place still hasn’t managed to complete one single transfer.

To top it all, last week when I challenged the LFASS loan amount that I am receiving, the reply from a senior civil servant was they were terribly sorry but, and I quote 'it’s better than nothing'.

So, there you have it folks, that is now the benchmark for success or failure in SGRIPD – it’s better than nothing and we should be grateful for it!

I keep hearing how hard they are working to sort this and I’m sure many are, but I’m afraid that doesn’t help the many individuals, particularly on LFA livestock farms that are struggling to survive or living on the credit offered by their suppliers.

The statistics churned out week after week in endless worthless press releases from ScotGov hide the misery being endured by hundreds, actually probably thousands, of farming families around Scotland.

My old friend and colleague, Peter Chapman (now in the parliament) is doing a great job of trying to hold ScotGov to account, but NFUS seem totally incapable of doing the same. I just don’t understand it.

But don’t worry. In the words of the chief operations officer for rural payments in Scotland, last week, she claimed they would get everyone paid by the end of June, 'we’re following industry best practice and are getting all the releases of computer functionality we need'.

Have you ever heard such absolute incomprehensible rubbish in your life – mind you, on reflection, she never said which June!