We finished drilling spring crops on April 22, with a few fields of spring barley and our seed spring oats which we didn’t manage to get drilled before the heavy rain at the start of the month.

The majority of our spring barley was sown in beautiful sunshine and dust at the end of March, but with April arriving and bringing with it two inches of rain, emergence of crops was very patchy. Headlands which had been rolled or any low lying or wetter areas of fields, look particularly bad.

As a result, we decided to cultivate and re-drill a couple of headlands and a few patches in fields which had rotted out. These are just starting to emerge now and hopefully will be worthwhile.

Nitrogen has been applied to spring barley crops and we will be applying herbicide and trace elements in the next couple of weeks.

Oilseed rape crops have had their final nitrogen application as well, and winter wheat crops look a good colour following their nitrogen – all in one go a few weeks ago, with an additive which allows slow release.

I have yet to sell anymore grain, having last sold two loads of malting barley in late March when it was £270/t, today November 22, futures are sitting at £324.90/t, marketing at the moment seems to just be a stab in the dark.

We are now in the thick of the carrot harvest which takes up the majority of the day, five or six days a week, with approximately 170 tonnes of carrots being lifted every day at the moment.

Lambing is finally over having taken nearly six weeks from the first to the last ewe to lamb. The bulk of these lambed in the first cycle, or the first few days of the second cycle and we then had a tiresome few weeks waiting for the last 15 to lamb, the majority of which were hoggs.

Out of the 20 home-bred Texel cross hoggs put to the tup, all 20 scanned in lamb, a promising start to the experiment I thought… The first one lambed herself in the night and bonded well with the lambs, further luring me into a false sense of security.

The next hogg dropped dead in the shed a few weeks ahead of lambing of what our vet thinks was a suspected choke. This was the beginning of the downward spiral.

Of the remaining 18 every single one had to be lambed, some very difficult lambings, one of which was by the vet, with a second small handed vet only just managing to get it out.

Two of the hoggs lost their lambs due to difficult lambings then refused foster lambs and a further six which just needed a small amount of assistance decided they hated their lambs. Three of those are only letting their lambs 'sook' when they’re standing eating cobbs or being held.

The single bearing hoggs hadn’t been getting concentrate feed prior to lambing and the lambs weren’t big but I found their pelvis’ we’re just too small. I know many people successfully lamb hoggs, but personally I won’t be tupping Texel cross hoggs again and will allow them to run through, as my gimmers of the same breeding typically had few issues lambing, had good maternal instincts and plenty of milk.

Outwith the hoggs, on a brighter note, every ewe and gimmer went out with a lamb, only one ewe died at lambing time and we didn’t have any caesarean sections. It is now five years since our last caesar.

Now lambing is over I’ve been busy getting lambs vaccinated with Ovi-vac and dosed for nematodiris. We’ve had quite a few cases of mastitis which is always disappointing, but is likely due to the cold winds we’ve been getting, though generally the weather has been good in April and our grass has been growing particularly well.