Sitting here on Burn’s Night and it only feeling like five minutes since Christmas, there are two old sayings or possibilities that spring to mind. The first – 'time flies when you are enjoying yourself' and the second – 'time goes by faster as we age'.

With our kids both having been home from university for a month and us having packed a considerable amount into that time, as well as an almost unprecedentedly kind January weather wise, I think I’ll plump for the former rather than admitting to advancing years! The particularly kind weather has already seen significant regrowth on our earliest closed paddocks. Hopefully it doesn’t still disappear with a lot of frost and snow.

With son James now more than capable of keeping his Dad right and able to get through a power of work, we now generally take the opportunity of giving our employees a long and well-earned break over Christmas and New Year.

I relish the chance to take things slightly easier for a week or so, only really keeping stock well fed and watered, and having more time to reflect on and discuss all that is going on and plan/tweak for the future. In typical fashion, the wheels did 'come off the cairt' on Christmas morning when we had to trace a major water leak which had left 100 out-wintered cows getting rather thirsty!

Payback for James and I came both before and after the men were on holiday, as we took ourselves around the country on a few day trips to visit a few more Angus and Hereford herds. We visited a stunning part of Cumbria, the beautiful Cheviot Hills, the Border lowlands and up to the hills of Perthshire. It was great to see both breeds being farmed and performing well on a relatively large scale and under some very commercial conditions. Thank you to all our hosts.

These were some long days as we were also setting up two donor cows and a batch of recipients at that time, with the timings for the programme seeming to work perfectly if we did this work before we left in the morning and on our return home.

Ten years had clouded my memory about just how onerous injections and heat detection can be well after my usual bedtime. The flush went reasonably well but with an reminder for me, and an early lesson for James, that you must 'work an average', with one donor producing six transferable embryos and the other a big fat zero! We wait with bated breath to scan the recipients in another month or so.

Meantime we are setting up the two Angus donors to flush again mid-February, along with a lovely polled heifer that we purchased down south in early December for our Hereford herd. A daughter of the 2019 Polled Hereford female of the Year, she looks like making a very balanced, correct, and moderate cow with a great set of numbers. Our travels have highlighted a sire or two to use over her in the flushing programme.

Beth’s Christmas was spent pulling together a 'Marketing' assignment as part of her degree in Agri-Business at Newcastle. Watching over her research, reading over her submission, and seeing the effort put in and the importance placed on it by others, was a stark reminder at just how backward as a whole industry we generally are at this ever so important practice. I am pretty sure that given time, it will not only be my tractor driving that is criticised by the next generation!

Weaned beef calves have also been treated for worms and fluke as well as being weighed again. Weight gains of only 0.55kg/day, on the arable silage I have spoken about previously, were a bit disappointing and levels of concentrate feed have been increased to just short of 2.5kg/day to try and get them back on track.

The hold up for weather for nearly 10 days at the point of cutting this crop has obviously had a significant detrimental effect on feed quality. We should perhaps have more faith in compensatory growth when they hit the spring grass, but with us having to ensure heifers are up to bulling weights by 14-15 months and the steers to be sold as early as August, there’s a limit to how much I want to leave to chance.

We are always keen to limit our use of triclabendazole to treat fluke, and often use other actives which require a longer period of housing before use to guarantee a properly effective treatment, but perhaps next year we will also consider worming the calves at, or much sooner after housing. On the bright side, and despite a very muggy December, pneumonia problems have been non-existent.

Read more: Ewes, rams, hinds and back into A-As

Tups were pulled from the commercial ewes early in the New Year after a period of 35 days. We took the chance to weigh all the ewes and record all those mated in the second cycle. Ewe weights and gains were generally quite pleasing with a gain of just under 100g/day over the 45-day period of flushing and mating. Ewes and gimmers are in pretty good order, but I’d still rather our gimmers were a couple of kg heavier.

Second cycle mating numbers were very pleasing at only 4.5% or 67 out of the 1480. Interestingly though the number was heavily skewed towards the gimmers, where almost 10% (50) had blue bums, whereas only 1.75% (17) of the ewes don’t appear to have held to first service. As always, the scanning man will tell us the whole story. Stud ewes are due to be scanned on Thursday.

Sheep, apart from stock tups, are now all onto swedes and the annual battle of keeping the brutes behind electric wires has commenced. After an encouraging start for us, it seems that the strength and depth in the sheep 'squad' may see them as Champions by the end of the season! If the ringleaders could have been identified early enough, they may have been better served as haggis somewhere this evening.

Slante Mhath