Some people like to have a little break for the festive season and take their mind off farming for a few days.

They tend to do the bare minimum at that stage.

In my own situation, after one day of eating and watching some terrible television, I am more than ready to get back out on the farm.

Having said that, I do make sure it is later starts in the morning and earlier finishes in the evening.

Around Christmas I also like to do a bit of an assessment of livestock performance.

I am never happy with a visual assessment. I like to weigh all the stock, so I can work out how they have performed in the house so far.

When I have them in the crush it is also a suitable time to treat for fluke and lice

Some people think that a visual assessment is good enough and that may work for those farmers, but I like to run the cattle over the weighbridge and have concrete information.

When I have them in the crush it is also a suitable time to treat for fluke and lice. The cattle are roughly three months in the house, so a fluke dose that kills adult fluke should be sufficient.

Knowledge

I hear a lot of talk around knowledge being vital for farmers, or for farming to be successful.

I am a big believer in the importance of making decisions based on hard evidence.

I like to know the quality of my silage and how my cattle are performing on it.

So you could say, I am driven by knowledge.

But in actual fact, knowledge is only the key to the lock and if you do not use it, then you will be no further on – how you use this knowledge will determine the success of your farm.

Act

Having weighed all my cattle and worked out their performance to date this winter, I am now in a position to act.

Some of my cattle have done really well and are actually outperforming what the silage analysis would have suggested. But on the other hand, there are some cattle that are not performing as I would have liked. I have finishing steers that are doing 1.7kg/day and finishing heifers that are achieving 1.2kg/day.

Then I have store cattle in different batches growing at 0.5 to 1kg/head/day.

The ones that are only doing 0.5kg/day are disappointing, but it is better knowing now and being able to do something about it. I cannot really pinpoint what is wrong, but I will try and adjust things to make a change.

It could be that lice or fluke affected some batches more than others, but having treated everything, this should not be a problem going forward.

Finish

I have also had a look through the weights and assessed what I think will finish out of the house and what will be going back to grass. I have adjusted the meal feeding to try and improve weight gains of the under-performers.

I may have to drop some down in feeding or bring some forward

I will run them across the weighbridge in about a month to review, and see if the changes I made had a positive effect. I will also re-assess the ones earmarked for finishing in the house. I may have to drop some down in feeding or bring some forward.

Having a weigh bridge on the farm is a really important asset. It gives me the information to make changes to my management. When those changes have a positive effect on animal performance, it gives a certain level of personal satisfaction.