Neil McGowan's experiences of Storm Arwen and, wolves ..

The force that brought it left terrible destruction in its wake. Thankfully, our problems will be resolved by a couple of days with a roofer and a winter of cutting trees and mending fences. Some neighbours have not been so lucky, having to deal with losses of stock, roofs and whole buildings.

Electricity has been off for four days now, but the 'hydro board' vans started to appear in the dark last night. They face a big task in our wee area and I understand it has been worse further down the line.

We don’t remember such a powerful north wind before and it has claimed a lot of big mature oaks, beach and birch usually sheltered from the west.

The first night in the dark was quite pleasant with the fire roaring and playing cards by candle-light, but we quickly began to miss all the things we depend on.

Read more: Good year for finished lambs for Field Margins' Neil McGowan

The folks who have replaced their old Raeburns for more modern cookers have gradually disappeared into hotels in town – particularly those whose work necessitates having a shower now and again!

We hadn’t quite got round to setting up the electric fence to put stock hoggs onto a forage crop, so that saved one problem.

The storm caught us in the middle of sorting Lleyn ewes into tupping groups and although the system relies on EID readers and electric weigh cells, we managed to keep things going with electric fence batteries. Debbie’s ‘magic-wand’ stick reader that we got via the Sustainable Agriculture Capital Grant Scheme (SACGS) had been a really useful tool to double-check which sheep go into particular fields and saved a lot of time and error.

I noticed she took it to Pony Club prizegiving on Saturday night to make sure it was fully charged for the next day, although I think the feeling of authority that it gives you might have been useful at such an event!

Reports are back on all the testing done on performance recorded lambs this season, giving us the most up to date prediction about their breeding potential to go along with what we see on the ground and what we hoped for from the pedigree. Fat and muscle scans and individual worm egg counts was the last information to go in and nearly impossible to have much of an understanding of without the data.

We had a good session sorting out pure Texel ewe lambs with particular scrutiny over anything assisted at birth. Getting Lleyn ram lambs down from 100 to 70 needed some tough judgement, but worm egg counts and index helped the final decision. Knowing that culls are coming to well over £100 encouraged the decision making.

Cows all went through the crate again last week for the annual herd health test. We had a vet for two mornings taking 216 blood samples for Johnes disease screening. BVD booster and IBR marker vaccination was done at the same time and long hair on tails and ears tidied up and lost tags replaced. It’s now fingers crossed as we await the results.

Herds around here that are running reasonable numbers of cows and doing something about Johnes seem to hover around R3 and R2 – getting a clear test or two and then another reactor. It can be demoralising, but at a recent vet herd-benchmarking meeting it was pointed out that the culls due to Johnes blood testing in most participating herds was significantly down on 5-10 years ago and clinical cases was a thing of the past in those herds.

'Graeme the vet' funds this benchmarking group with a meal and a pint sponsored by a drug company and it has given us some really useful information; great discussion points; and provided extra motivation to improve. This is a complete contrast to the final Beef Efficiency Scheme report that arrived about the same time and told us nothing new or interesting – but we did get a lot more than a steak pie and a beer in the early stages of that scheme!

Calves have settled into their winter regime now. There was a very mild spell about a fortnight ago when there were a few hanging lugs and coughs – and appetite took a plunge.

We treated a few for pneumonia and let one court-full out to a paddock on the warmest, airless, dry day. They enjoyed their day out, grazed a bit and lay in the sun and an old cow led them back inside at dusk with minimum stress. It seemed to help and with the weather turning colder there have been no more issues. Luing steers have all gone.

Some 10 years ago, a young German lad sent an email wondering if he could come and work with us for a couple of weeks as he was keen on sheep and had recently completed his shepherd’s apprenticeship.

Intrigued to learn about sheep in Germany we agreed, and a good friendship started. I stayed with him last month for a few days when we spoke together at an organic sheep and goat breeder’s conference on the German/Swiss border. I spoke about what we did and Jonas translated.

Jonas has a unique command of language, having learnt English working in various sheep yards in New Zealand, UK and the Falkland Islands, and I guess the Spanish he picked up working sheep in Chile and Argentina has given him a similarly colourful vocabulary that might not help secure an ‘O’ grade, but the number of words he knows for an 18-month-old female sheep is second to none!

He grazes a flock of around 800 ewes mostly on a grazing-right he has on an area of natural grassland that has been used for military operations for over 100 years.

There are an estimated 12 pieces of unexploded ammunition per square metre over the 7000-acre site – so there is no permanent fencing, no off-road driving, and certainly no tillage! Jonas is one of 11 shepherds who tend their flocks daily, walking with them as they graze and penning them up behind electric net at night.

During the winter, he walks his flock on a route around fields of ‘greening’ (set aside) and un-grazed riverbanks and woodlands in what is mostly an arable cropping area lying down to the banks of the River Danube.

The ‘native’ Merino ewes are tall, lanky sheep with little shape or character but are sound movers and have a good flocking instinct to follow where they are led. Jonas has used Lleyn and Cheviot rams in a bid to make them more robust and prolific.

I found the conference hard to follow as my German is about as good as my hosts’ five-year-old son’s English (although we managed fine together), but I enjoyed the organic goat cheese, particularly when washed down with Wiess beer.

The one topic that clearly united all delegates was wolves. They are becoming a serious problem as numbers grow unchecked. Finland has already put a limit of 500 wolves and culling beyond that level and I think the German population is estimated at above 1000.

We need to watch what happens in Germany – a country with a mainly urban population and a productive farmland with it’s share of wild areas – lots of domestic dogs and people who like to enjoy the countryside – and people who like the idea of a large predator reintroduced to a land that has changed out of all recognition to the one it was forced out of centuries before!

The most interesting thing I found was that the traditional shepherds of south-west Germany, like Jonas, had been given UNESCO red list status as culturally important, endangered and worth preserving.

As we look to the growing list of threats to our industry – net-zero, species re-introduction, change in support mechanism – we maybe need to think not just what we produce in terms of food, landscape, environment, sequestration, but also of our cultural role.

The great thing about culture is that it doesn’t cost much – it is ‘who we are’, it is about tradition … and it usually involves getting together and having a good time!