We saw the New Year at Kilry Hall with plenty of dancing and nonsense led in all ways by Stewart the Singing Shepherd fae Stow. In the haze that followed, we seem to have made it unscathed right through to Blue Monday already.

Blue Monday is supposed to be the most miserable day of the year: when personal debt is high; it’s a long time since pay-day and until the next one; another bank holiday is out of sight; New Year’s resolutions have failed; and the weather is usually a bit dark and depressing too.

Instead, we had another grand day of hard frost and bright sunshine, allowing us to get the last of the cattle courts mucked out. The only hiccup was frozen water bowls again in bull pens and the chooks’ house, but we are getting used to that again as winter sets in.

We have had a good spell of hard weather and there has been a lot of muck moved around the area over the last couple of weeks. Straw for dung arrangements sees the glen roads busier for a few weeks with tractors and carts than the timber lorries still hauling wind blow from Storm Arwen.

With some extra family help around the Christmas holidays, we spent the wet days halter-breaking the weaned bull calves. We got all 32 tied up three times each and spent a good amount of time grooming, scratching itchy bits, and generally getting them used to people. Although they are not at the stage of being led, they have respect for a halter and will be more manageable through their lifetime. The process also challenges their attitude and highlighted a couple that didn’t adapt to close human contact very well. Those types are better to join the food chain than grow into a herd sire.

If you are heading out to bull sales in the next few weeks, keep in mind all those things that matter and perhaps more than just how the bull looks on the day and what he’s bringing to the herd genetically. Health, structural functionality, and temperament are the foundations to start building the rest of the bull.

Kids on long student holidays have been helpful, with the agriculture student taking on some cattle feeding chores. The vet student had a week on her poultry practical placement to start her Christmas break – spent in the turkey processing shed on the farm she did a lambing on. A busy week ensured she got a good grounding in poultry anatomy and provided a really good Christmas dinner.

Ewes are now onto forage crops. Swedes haven’t been a great success, but the green turnips are a decent crop and seem to have lasted the frost so far – time will tell how hardy they really are. We trialled direct drilling them this year and sowed them in alternate drills. I think the more vigorous greens overtook the Swedes too early on and didn’t give them a chance. Another new plan is needed next year.

Ram hoggets came through the yards to join up with some that had been out with ewes and we took another chance to pull some more out to the cull pen. A few, mostly with leg structure issues, were well out of spec but returned a good trade in the live ring. The rest are now onto bale grazing, with red clover silage bales set out behind a hot wire on the grass field that will go into turnips next spring. They are looking well and have benefited from more grass in the autumn than usual.

The last 25 finishing lambs have outlasted their forage crop and are now inside eating pellets. They are not a fancy bunch – but they should all go in a couple of weeks, giving the shed plenty of time to get a good clean out before Texels lamb at the end of March.

January is a good time to get a bit of perspective. Whether it’s a bit of quiet time over the New Year or contemplating the one to come – I’m also thinking about conference season. I got a student pass to the Oxford Farming Conference about 30 years ago and really enjoyed it. I’ve not been back, but I like to read the press coverage and I’ve sometimes watched speakers by video link. But it’s not the same as the immersive experience and the perspective that gives you for your own business.

I was at the Nuffield Conference in the back end, and one of the speakers challenged us ‘what plan do you have in place to make your business more adaptive to climate change’? His point is that if something as fundamental to farming as the weather pattern is changing, then we need to evolve our systems to deal with it – rather than just complaining when we don’t like it. That is a license to try something new this year folks!

Our shot at gaining perspective this January has been on a couple of family trips. The first was a trip to catch up with family (and see a bull), in Yorkshire. Travelling down through East Lothian, it looks as wonderful as it always does. Northumberland looked alright, the Yorkshire Wolds tremendous on its chalky, limestone plateau. But the low lying, heavier land of Yorkshire was suffering from a very wet winter.

The new subsidy regime South of the Border is starting to bite too. Basic payment cheques are a lot lighter and the measures to replace that income don’t cover the shortfall. There are a lot more cover crops in, and there seems to be a pretty attractive option to sow multi-species grassland on the arable ground – but less livestock to utilise it. It seems every option in their sights has less food production at the heart of it.

It was good to get home and take a walk up Kinpurney Hill, overlooking Strathmore from the other side of the valley. Strathmore is wet. There is still a lot of flooding. A good lot of ground has been ploughed, but there looked very few fields showing up with the green shoots of winter grain – but it’s not as wet as down by the Humber. It’s a braw view though, from the Lomond Hills, to Ben Lawers and right up to Lochnagar.

So, my perspective from the top of Kinpurney Hill: the climate is changing – and policy is about to. We need to be ready to adapt and try new things. That gives us the responsibility to take a look at what we are doing, and the license to try something different in 2024. What an exciting time to be a farmer! …and we are immune to all this Blue Monday nonsense.

It turns out that Blue Monday is the invention of a holiday firm’s advertising agency. I guess farmers weren’t their target audience anyway. A bright, happy January to you all and stuff the Blue Monday!