Our new field margin columnist, Jim Logan

Rising from 750 to 1700 feet above sea level, our family partnership along with one full time employee, a placement student and a bit of seasonal help, now run 1650 breeding ewes – made up of 1500 NZ Romney composites and 150 Texels and Suffolks – 120 suckler cows and 330 red deer hinds.

Historically we ran a fully stratified sheep system consisting of 400 Blackfaces, 800 Mules and Texel crosses and 130 Texel and Suffolk sheep along with a herd of 110 pedigree and pure-bred Aberdeen-Angus cattle.

In 2010 we reached the pinnacle of our previous farming career, the year started well when we sold our team of Aberdeen-Angus bulls at the inaugural February Bull Sale in the new Stirling market, to average 15,000gns and topping the sale at 28,000gns. A further young bull was sold into another top pedigree herd for £15,000 a month or two later at under a year old.

The summer saw us winning the champion and reserve tickets in the Blackface section of the RHASS. I should add this was after many years of having “great fun trying”. The memories of that day are amongst the very best we shared over the years with my long-time friend and shepherd at the time, Derek Redpath. Equally good, if not better memories come from the feeling of relief and excitement of arriving with our annual consignments of Texel and Suffolk shearlings at Kelso, especially on the years that we had them “just right”.

Stud ewes overwinter on swedes to keep them in condition for lambing time Ref:RH16032143 Rob Haining / The Scottish Farmer...

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and by the beginning of 2011 Lady Luck (or more truthfully, some bad luck and a lapse in biosecurity) had dealt us a cruel hand.

To cut a long story short, two animal health issues (a Johnes breakdown in the cattle and a CLA breakdown in rams) led to us withdrawing from the sale of breeding cattle and cost us almost an entire year of ram sales as well as most of our stock rams. The day we sent over £100,000 worth of quality breeding rams direct to the abattoir, so there was no chance of them ending up infecting any other flock, is one I will never forget.

I am grateful to this day to the faithful customers who, after a lot of testing, had the faith in us to purchase our remaining rams that year, giving us a real lift in what was otherwise a very dreary sale season.

People’s reaction to our openness and how we dealt with those problems, really honed a very important lesson in my life, the difference between reputation and integrity. Reputation is merely how you are perceived by others and may well be a description that is not always matched by your actions; whereas integrity is dependent on how you act, regardless of who is watching.

Some of the red deer hinds that are due their first calve later in the spring Ref:RH16032151 Rob Haining / The Scottish Farmer...

They say, “every cloud has a silver lining” and what these two catastrophes did offer, was a lot of time. Time that would otherwise have been spent dressing and feeding tups or blow-drying bulls, was freed up to concentrate on a very critical analysis of our whole business.

This clearly pointed to a very high input/output system with a high dependence on subsidy and pedigree sales to consistently return a good profit. The core business of producing beef and lamb was far from profitable as a stand-alone enterprise. Hardly sustainable if I was brutally honest and beset with all sorts of risks.

I metaphorically took myself back to school, dredging the internet and social media, speaking to pasture-based farmers, both abroad and in this country, to learn about farming in a very different way and without reliance on subsidies. A plan started to formulate. We dabbled with rotational grazing, rather un-successfully I might add, but it did flag up the potential to grow and manage grass much more intensively.

field walking measuring the grass Ref:RH16032148 Rob Haining / The Scottish Farmer...

The consistent theme on almost all these farms was the stock’s feed demand being much better aligned with grass growth, than that of our own. Allied to that, some form of controlled (rotational) grazing was in place for most, if not the whole year, so that feed resources could be more accurately budgeted and apportioned.

These systems were built and optimised around maximising the use of pasture and then other home-grown forages. Thinking of feed in terms of a cost per kg of dry matter has become second nature and now drives nearly all our feeding plans and decisions. The alignment of supply and demand is easily manipulated, simply by adjusting mating dates. As the day we set the course and timing of that feed demand for the whole of the following year, it is the most important date in the calendar.

After the very difficult and expensive winter/spring of 2012/13 we took the bull by the horns and shifted our own tupping date back by almost 4 four weeks to start lambing around April, 25. Hopefully the two illustrations attached show how the feed demand of our ewes now almost mirrors our average grass growth curve. Concentrates are now used as a targeted supplement for priority groups or in exceptional circumstances. We do still teach all our youngstock to eat concentrates as an insurance policy and one that we have had to fall back on, more than once.

The later lambing date also allowed us to lamb outdoors, but our breeding policy and goals had to change dramatically to enable this. Our stud flocks of Texels and Suffolks have moved down a very different genetic path, where we concentrate heavily on lambing ease, lamb vigour and the ability to thrive on forage alone. NZ Romney genetics were also added into the commercial ewes and are now a cornerstone of the system. These commercial ewes are now all lambed outdoors other than a few triplets that are housed at night.

Jim is weighting tup hoggs to see how they are progressing Ref:RH16032128 Rob Haining / The Scottish Farmer...

The headline “scanning percentage” in our commercial ewes is now significantly lower. Historically our Mule and Texel cross ewes would scan at more than 200%, with a high percentage of triplets. It is a bit counter intuitive, but we now target 175-180% to increase our overall margins. For our outdoor lambing ewes, an increase is unlikely to lead to any higher profit because of the negative effects on lamb and ewe mortality, lamb growth rates and total feed required. Lamb mortality, tailing percentages and weaning rates, rather than scanning percentage have always been the big driver for me and are figures that I have tracked since our early years of scanning. With the improvement in our genetics and management, we now regularly have lamb mortality from scanning to tailing of 8-9% (compared to national average of 15-18%) and selling/retaining around 90% of lambs scanned from our outdoor lambing compared to nearer 85% in our old system.

We have been on quite a journey, but I am confident that the changes have resulted in a business much better placed to face the challenges of the future.

However, things have not always gone to plan, mistakes have been made and I am always the first to admit that not all my ideas have been winners. I still vividly remember the time we took my dog named Shark for a run at the beach!

Average pasture growth for main block on Pirntaton