What a great summer we’ve had. Maybe it was a fortnight late in getting started, but now at the harvest end of summer we are a fortnight ahead with combines long away and straw gathered in with some warm, sunny days to spare.

The bit of grain land at Incheoch is let to Scott the Case tractor enthusiast. He seemed happy with a good yield of malting barley and left some in the corner of the shed for us to treat with the urea-based product, Maxammon. The mobile bruiser that processed the grain even had to attach a hosepipe to get it up to the minimum 15% moisture.

Read more: Neil McGowan aims to improve in-lamb survival at Incheoch

A field of winter oats fits Scott’s rotation further down the valley, which we will use rather than barley in rations for young breeding bulls. It is still sitting in a heap and will get bruised in smaller batches through the winter.

Less disruption for the distillers this year doesn’t seem to have made the by-product we have relied on for protein much more plentiful, although we have one load secured. Silage was good, with quite a lot of red clover included – the first analysis shows a good sample, but not the fantastic protein we were hoping for. We’ll get more accurate samples once the pit is open. Better get one of the treated barley too, before we get winter rations sorted out, to see if the promised protein lift has materialised.

The bad news at harvest was the rotary combine that was due to come here broke down and the part was delayed for the now usual reason of Covid/Brexit/Suez Canal (delete as appropriate). The good news was the old replacement machine left a grand bout of straw. Straw quality and yield has been good. Dad was looking back his diary at bale counts from 20 years ago, when I was baling with a, then, 20-year-old baler. The tally doesn’t look so impressive today but the five foot round bales have a lot more straw packed in.

Read more: Goodies from SAAGS for our Field Margins columnist Neil McGowan

Our introduction to paddock grazing would best be described as ‘a learning experience’. It seems we made the rookie mistake which Jim referred to and tried to rely on ewes and lambs to apply the grazing pressure to leave a neat residual sward – forcing them to eat down the plant more than ideal for animal performance. These lambs certainly took a check with worms quicker than those on conventionally managed fields, needing a drench a fortnight before weaning. Subsequently, I didn’t drench that batch at weaning and they then took another knock when my eye was off the ball about tup sale time. Unfortunately they have lost a bit of time but despite that, lamb sales are still ahead of last year.

Options to improve for next year are 1) to give up; 2) more paddocks and introduce another class of stock (probably dry hoggs or growing heifers) to do the hard work; or 3) do the same again but be prepared to take FECs quicker. The quality and abundance of feed available at this stage in the season is motivation to try again.

The biggest day in our year is without doubt our on-farm ram and bull sale, which was almost three weeks ago as I write. With a bit of Covid uncertainty and a successful sale using an online sale platform last year, we ran the sale on the same system.

We had almost 100 people at the farm on sale day (a few less than normal), and some others had viewed stock previously. The on-line silent auction meant that all lots in each section were available until all bidding had completed. For instance, someone who had picked Texel Lot 50 could swap to their second choice Lot 30 if they thought it had become better value.

Atmosphere at the sale was quite different, with a lot of people commenting that they missed the buzz of the sale ring but found there was more time to make better decisions. My job was much more relaxed on the day – instead of nearly two hours in the sale ring dancing with tups, I had time to talk to folk about the rams.

Debbie was co-ordinating the computer side of things with a team of helpers. Her job didn’t look very relaxed! … especially when the internet took a wee blip for a minute or two – but the sale was just extended a bit and nothing was effected.

Some 50% of bidders were on the farm – many bidding from phones or tablets in the sale shed or even the ram pens and 30% of bidders hadn’t actually seen the stock, but relied on videos, photographs and performance figures to make their selection. Most of the ‘unseen’ buyers were from a distance or had just been busy on the day.

We’ve enjoyed hearing where people bid from. The prize for most unexpected is split between the guy who bid from a wedding in Ireland and the lad who couldn’t get connection on his mackerel boat so had to phone his brother who placed bids for him from an oil rig in the North Sea!

In all, just under 100 rams sold in two sections that took about 15 minutes each to close down.

The bull sale was a bit of a slower burn, with an excellent trade on the day for the pick of the bulls – with homozygous polled, red Simmentals proving popular. However, over the following weeks we have got some more placed and have finished up with 13 of the 19 bulls sold to average just over £4300. There has been a lot less feed and work invested in these young bulls than we would have done in the past, which is better for us, the buyer and the bulls themselves.

The lows of the sale have been the hair-pulling frustration of trying to edit videos of the rams and bulls (something that I thought I’d learned last year, but made similar mistakes again), and trying to get rams exported to Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man.

Scrapie genotypes and export certificates with journey plans and pre-travel vet-checks are all reasonable steps, but the sheer volume of paper, detail required and pointless bureaucracy brings needless inefficiency and seems such a waste of a vet’s time – we could have had a really detailed herd health plan done in the time it takes to rubber stamp the right bits of paper in the right order. Rant over.

All in all, the mix of on-line and on-farm worked well for us, was really low-stress for stock, and we are getting plenty of encouragement from clients to do the same again.

I really enjoyed my trip down to Kelso Ram Sales to try to find a Texel. It was a fine day and grand to have no tents, although my head was still groggy the next day from the smell of the dip. It is a well-oiled machine and hats off to the organisers for making it happen.

I seem to be spending a lot of time in the sheep yards this week again. We have run through all the Lleyn ewes and sorted out culls and condition scored. We record condition scores a couple of times a year because we think that the information will be used in our breeding programme in the future, but to just get a hand on the ewes and pull out the leanest 10 or 20% for better grazing when grass is plentiful is a good thing to do.

It’s been a good harvest overall, but the prize for the best crop has got to be on the plum tree between the garden and the sheep yards. The short-legged Scots Dumpies have been standing under it for a fortnight now, pecking at the low-hanging fruit and looking longingly at the bounty further up the branches. After a few days they discovered if they could balance on the fence that a whole new horizon opens up to them, and today I saw one standing on the top of a step ladder – looking very pleased with herself!

The plums are now deliciously ripe and the best crop we have ever had – more than enough to share with our chooks.