In a blaze of hopeless optimism, we cut a field of hay in the first half of July when we thought it couldn’t get much wetter. It then lay, pressed flat to the ground by pounding thunder showers for well over a week until two consecutive drouthy days saw it wrapped up in black plastic and hidden from sight.

The rest of the hay has followed suit – cut, thrown out for a day or two, raked, baled and wrapped. It is a good job Luing cows like large quantities of poor-quality fodder, because that is now what we have in store for them!

By great luck, most of the cattle feed was secured in the pit during the dry spell before the Highland Show, and there is quite a store of hay from last year – overall a pretty good position. Watching hay turn that nasty yellow-brown colour of dead rushes can fairly knock the optimism out of you though.

The yellow, bare stubbles behind the mature ‘haylage’ as it turned out, is a long way short of the earlier cut fields too. Those early fields have mostly had an application of slurry with the slatted shed tank now as empty as we can get it. Spreading regulations have caught up with us and the contractor appeared with a spanking new dribble bar attachment to the back of the spreader. I don’t know why we haven’t been using that before. The job was faster; slurry was left in neat rows so that most of the leaf in the field was still catching whatever sunlight was about; and it didn’t smell so much. Winning every way.

These fields now have ewes and lambs on them, and although they are still young, I’m tempted to wean fairly soon and leave that good feed to just the lambs. I was on a place in New Zealand that was weaning at 60 days and 21kg average lamb weight. They had a lot of plantain/white clover that was great lamb feed and then thousands of acres of bare, dry hillsides which was ideal dry-ewe country – so they split them up as soon as they thought they’d get away with it.

We got ewes shorn early July after a week of unusually numerous and particularly bad fly-strikes. Lambs came back through last week to collect eight-week weights for our genetic evaluation programme. It’s a really slick job nowadays – they’ve been down the race a couple of times now so they rattle through the manual crate, it beeps when it reads the tag and again when the weight has stabilised and you let the next one in. Debbie, Tally and I were weighing 100 lambs every 10 minutes.

When we started recording these weights we were working a spring balance crate out in the field with a clip-board writing down tags numbers. Tally (our eldest) was there then too – but playing in a carry-cot at the side of the mobile yards. Without spending a fortune and using often second-hand equipment, we are now able to gather so much more useful information on a far bigger number of sheep that in those days before EID.

These eight-week weights give an indication of growth – but it highlights, for example, the sheep that maybe don’t have a lot of growth potential (those which we don’t expect to grow all that fast), but that have really good lambs at shearing time. These are the ones which end up with a good ‘maternal EBV’ – the guage of milk or motherliness that we place high regard to in our flock. This ‘maternal’ figure is sometimes called ‘milk’ in beef cattle evaluations – but I think there are a variety of ways a cow or ewe can get to the same outcome and it’s not all down to milk.

One of the early Lleyn ewes that the programme identified as ‘good maternal’ would always be waiting at the end of the race to pick up her lambs if they’d been shed off – and the lambs would tend to come through the race one after the other. They seemed to just have a really strong family bond. A Kiwi Romney breeder shared his belief that the more placid ewe that was less stressed about predators would leave the vantage point at the top of the ridge (where the grass was cropped short), and forage in the gullies to find the best clover. Her lambs would weigh heavy and although we’d assumed we identified the genetics of more milk – the genetics were for behaviour and heavier lambs were simply a function of that behaviour. She was just better adapted to the farm.

Lamb weights were more than satisfactory despite the miserable weather recently and what was an extended time hanging around the yards at shearing, which could probably be written off as ‘no-growth-days’. Every day ought to be a ‘growing-day’ for lambs here. I’m not confident enough (especially after the hay episode), to make any predictions on numbers yet, but I think they’re looking pretty good.

Yearling cattle were through the crate to get a pour-on a couple of weeks ago. Heifers were drawn to the bull then too – and two short gestation Angus bulls are now at work. The pure Luing heifers averaged 490kg at 15 months. We looked at the lightest couple that were about 430kg with a bit of doubt, but concluded they were smaller types anyway and were mature enough looking, so they went too. They will only get six weeks with the bull, so we’ve more or less left it up to them to see who wants to join the herd.

Their brothers – as steers – grazed since April 24 (which was quite early here), weighed in at 546kg on average, having done 0.9kg/day since turnout. They have not been grazing the best of fields, but they have been getting the pick of it without being worked too hard. I think they are needing onto better grazing now, as they will need to keep that level up if they are to get finished at grass. They are pretty fleshy though, and I think it’s amazing what these raw looking cattle can turn into after a spell at decent grass.

Bulls are all starting to walk the fence lines a bit more and are growling and bellowing at each other across the valleys. I’m taking that as a sign that things are quietening down with their own cows. We have started bringing in some of the younger bulls that went out and joining up some groups. A phone call around some of last years’ bull buyers to check that bulls were behaving themselves highlighted that a lot of you are swapping bulls between groups every cycle, just to minimise the risk of something not working.

A couple of bull related changes in plan (one enforced, and a couple pedigree-breeder-dilemmas …gotta use this bull before we sell him sort of thing), meant the grazing plan went out of the window and cows will have to work a bit in the coming month to get some pastures back in control.

Forage crops are responding well to thunder showers and warm spells. There is a bit of arable silage that would just about do anytime it dries up. Other than that, we are on Ram and Bull Sale preparation. Sheds are cleaned up and pens built. Cataloguing lots, data gathering in the office, photography and videos are next in the plan. September 5 sale day is just over a month away and plenty to do to get ready for it.

Kids are getting pretty useful now, but that seems to have coincided with them finding better things to do. The vet student has had a spell with dairy cows and is now on pig placement, and the school-leaver is farm-sitting for neighbours. There is a French lad here for a few weeks, and language is proving to be a bit of a barrier at this initial stage. However, get him in the stock yards and he has a gift for standing in the right place – that is a language all on its own – and if you can ‘talk stock’, there’s a job for you anywhere in the world!