The clocks have changed but we aren’t quite into the winter routine yet as we have just this week finished strawing down carrots for the year.

Wet and windy conditions over the past month have meant there have been lots of days we haven’t been able to work, meaning the job has taken a bit longer than planned, but that’s just the weather for you! Early drilled crops of winter wheat and oilseed rape are looking well, likely due to the mild conditions we have had through the autumn. The wheat we drilled on October 22, has finally appeared after taking more than three weeks to emerge. Though drilled in reasonable conditions it has been so wet since, with parts of the field lying in water, so it is looking pretty patchy in places.

We are unsure if some of the seed has rotted out or if in the wetter areas the seed is just taking longer to emerge due to the colder soil temperatures. We haven’t done any winter ploughing yet due to being busy with straw spreading, but we aren’t in any rush to start this at the moment, as a number of our fields are in retained winter stubble or other agri-environment schemes so can’t be ploughed till January or March anyway.

On the livestock enterprise, we had a full scale sheep inspection earlier in the month, so que a panic-stricken couple of days worrying whether everything was as it should be. Fortunately, Mam’s record keeping was all in order, so the inspection process was relatively pain-free.

We have been putting fat lambs off over the past couple of weeks after starting some of them on creep feed. So far we have been pleased with our prices which averaged £122 per head one week, followed by £128 the following week, and £122 for lighter lambs a fortnight later.

We have around 80 lambs left to go yet so hopefully prices remain buoyant. The smallest lambs were pulled out back in September and have been grazing on stubbles. They will go onto a fodder neep and rape mix in a few weeks time and then start on creep feed with the aim of having all lambs away fat by the end of January.

Tupping appears to be going well with us now over half way through the second cycle and not many ewes having returned to the tup so far. Due to increasing our breeding ewe flock to 240 females, and keeping all our lambs to fatten, rather than selling some store at weaning as we usually do, we’ve found ourselves tight for grass. We therefore decided to rent 40 acres of grazing we were offered around five miles away from the farm which we are tupping 110 ewes on.

This area didn’t have any stock proof fences, so we put we put 2.5km of three wire electric fencing round it using our Rappa electric fencing machine, which took us about four hours to complete. This has inspired us to start thinking about more opportunities to put temporary electric fencing round areas of cover crops in our own arable fields to utilise area without investing in permanent fencing as many of our these arable fields no longer have stock proof fences. The ewes were relatively easy to train to the electric fence we found, the lambs not so much...