In some ways our farm isn’t dissimilar from the stereotypical British farm. You know the ones you see on picture postcards? All rolling patchwork fields, old barns and ramshackle machinery. Our farm is pretty old school, and we can sometimes be a little envious of farms built on greenfield sites, where everything was made to order, carefully planned and constructed for maximum efficiency. Our buildings are pretty patchwork really, a mix of old and new, some on farm, and others dotted around in the vicinity. We’ve recently started renting another building just down the road with the aim of thinning out our heifer calves, reducing stocking rates and thereby decreasing disease pressure. By taking 35 heifers out of the existing heifer shed we hope to give the others plenty of room to grow.
Like the postcards, we have plenty of patchwork fields, looking very lush after all this rain, and not a little muddy. With our slurry lagoons full to the brim we are glad to see the end of the NVZ closed period and are starting muck spreading where possible. Last year saw us growing wheat for the first time in 15 years, which we are now selling. We were hoping to grow more this year but due to the weather we’ve only been able to maintain the same area. This has affected our plans for which fields to crop for grass, wholecrop and maize silage.
There’s a pretty generous selection of machinery on our farm too, of varying states of repair. We’ve just bought our largest ever tractor, a second-hand 280hp lump which will be handy for heavy cultivation and should drive the slurry stirrer excellently! But there is always the unknown factor when buying second-hand so the true merit of this investment will only become clear with time.
With our assortment of buildings, projects and machinery, the whole farm can appear a bit patchwork at times, but a consistent aim to improve, and an emphasis on consolidation, mean that our grip on the essentials continues to be strengthened. Of course there are still things that we’d like to improve, at the moment our spring group is starting to calve, but in an ideal world we’d like all our cows to calve in one block between July and September, with only a few to cull. This is why we are continually hunting for high fertility and long life in our bull selection.
In all areas, our emphasis is on changing the things we can and working around the things we can’t. A healthy dose of perspective is always useful too, while we’ve been experiencing the difficulties that come with heavy and prolonged rainfall, the people of Australia have had to cope with horrendous bush fires and droughts. All things considered, I think we’d all prefer the rain any day.