By Rachel Young

The dawn of 2020 may have brought about various ideas of change, such as George Monbiot telling us that, as farmers, we’re all going to be obsolete in the next 20 years, with all foodstuff being created in factories using bacteria, microbes and robots, and Harry and Meghan leaving their positions as senior members of the Royal family.

But 2020 has certainly not brought about any changes to most farmers' favourite topic – the weather!

We have been hammered with more deluges of rain since the calendar changed making ground conditions even worse. As one of our carrot fields hadn’t been strawed down due to the wet autumn, the decision was made to attempt lifting.

Approximately half the field was lifted with great difficulty, with a 260 hp tractor and trailer with only half a load of carrots on often requiring a second tractor on the front to pull it.

Conditions were so bad, the decision was made to stop lifting and to instead straw down the parts of the field where the spreader could travel and leave the rest of the crop to take its chance with the frost. There are still a large amount of shaws on the crop, which should provide some frost protection as long as temperatures don’t drop too low.

We took a couple of days off from all but necessary tasks on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and returned to usual activities on December 27 by gathering in our lambs and dosing them. We left them another week outside to eat the last of the fodder neeps and started creep feeding them, and have now taken them inside to finish.

The first of our lambs were sold at Dingwall Mart on Tuesday, January 14, and averaged £94 per head, with the top priced 15 lambs making £97 each. We still have the smallest 30 lambs outside getting fed silage and have started creep feeding them too and will eventually take them inside.

We usually prefer to finish the majority of our lambs outside, firstly because it is considerably less work and secondly because it is more natural for sheep. However, we felt it best to take them inside this year considering how wet all the fields are.

I have to say, though, feeding our indoor lambs, they look considerably happier munching away on their feed with dry backs and a clean dry bed than the 30 outdoor lambs that were roaming about the stubble field beside the steading, soaked through, looking for any kind of shelter from the torrential wind and rain.

Our indoor sheep system is highly inefficient in terms of labour, as all feeding and bedding has to be done by hand as we can’t get a tractor or forklift into the old, low sheds. But it’s highly effective, if like mam and dad, you have over-indulged on a few too many tins of Quality Street, or Ferrero Rocher if 2019 treated you well, and you are trying to get into a calorie deficit.

As we manually graiped silage into feeders and walked about with flakes of straw and buckets of feed I asked my parents was this what it was like back in the day when so many more jobs were manual. They both reminisced about their childhoods spent cutting neeps and bedding courts of cattle by hand.

It made me feel quite sad that though in the last 50 years huge amounts of progress has been made in agricultural technology, it has taken away many of the opportunities for a family to get to work together on farm.

However, as mam started shouting at dad for graiping the silage into the wrong end of the troughs, I started to think that maybe ‘family working time’ is better in small doses – Harry and Meghan must have been thinking the same!