Andrew Duffus farms alongside his wife Debbie and their three sons Sam, Ben and Max near Tomintoul in the Cairngorm National Park.

They are tenants of the Crown Estate on two units, Mains of Auchriachan, the home farm and Glenconglas, an out-farm four miles away. They are hill farms, carrying 95 suckler cows and 640 ewes. A small area of land 24 miles away is also rented to grow barley to give feeding and straw for bedding.

The ewes are run on a traditional Scottish stratified system with the 400 hill Blackface flock producing mules for a 240 ewe inbye flock. These ewes are then put to mainly Texel tups to produce mainly store lambs although some lambs go away fat.

Cows calve in two similar-sized groups, spring (March/April) and autumn (September/October). Cows are mainly Simmental cross and we run three bulls, a Simmental to breed replacements, a Limousin for the heifers and a Charolais to produce store cattle at around the yearling stage.

The farms have a limited area of inbye land at Class 4.1 and this runs through to the worst of the hill at Class 7. There is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on part of the hill land and two Special Areas of Conservation (SAC), one along with the SSSI on the hill and one on the river that runs through the farm, the Conglas water. The farm is a mix of both extensive low-input farming on the hill with a higher-input, more intensive system on the inbye land.

Farm plan

Mains of Auchriachan is running a stocking rate of 0.22 livestock units per hectare (LU/ha). Taking account of the hill land and adjusting the total hectares for this, the farm has an adjusted stocking rate of 0.74LU/ha. This farm offers a large opportunity to increase the stocking rate. However, to stay within the cashflow of the business it has been decided to make a small impact on the hill land with the establishment of a 20-cow hill herd. The majority of the intensification on this unit will be on the 160ha of inbye land.

The farm has some issues with soil fertility, so in order to intensify the inbye land the first thing required will be to raise pH (lime), P (phosphate) and K (potash).

Soil tests have been taken recently as part of a distillery spent wash (undried pot ale) spreading contract. The spent wash will contribute P and K but will need extra lime to return the pH to above 6.0 as it is an acidic product.

To increase the amount of grazed grass that is utilised, year one will see the cattle being rotated through several fields beside each other at Glenconglas.

The Duffus’ have already started to tighten the calving periods and this work will continue through the project with the plan being to have two 10-week calving periods. Weaning rates in the spring herd are above the national average at 90% of cows raising a calf to weaning, whereas the autumn herd is at the national average of 85%. The target for both herds will be to have weaning rates above 90%.

Andrew Duffus:

Conditions are a lot better than when we last wrote, with the sun even having made an appearance, although this past week has seen a bit of rain which was badly needed. We have been busy with tidying up lambing, marking and turning out cattle.

Final tally from lambing gives us 702 lambs running with 564 ewes. We started with 640 ewes going to the tup. After scanning, we were down to 583 ewes after the empties were out. I managed to pick up 40 pregnant Shetland cross ewes to add to the flock when I dropped off the culls at the mart at good money. Over the rest of winter, another 15 ewes were lost, leaving 608 to lamb. Barring the couple of days of snow in the second week of May, conditions were pretty good. However, those two days really hit badly as the ewes were at peak lambing and I reckon around 40 of the ewes without lambs at the end of lambing are the result of those two days.

That leaves us with a result of 124% after lambing. It’s behind where I would like to be and we are looking at things to see what we can do to fix it. One thing is that we can’t change the weather. We are already in the process of putting up a shed this summer that was mainly to be used as a covered area to handle sheep in. Going forward, if get the threat of weather like that again in lambing, we will be able to house the mule ewes until the worst of it passes. The blackies will stay in the current lambing park but with the reduced stocking rate, there should be enough shelter there for them.

The farm is split into two sections, the main home section, Mains of Auchriachan and another block of land, Glenconglass about four miles away. During winter, we keep the autumn-calving cows and the weaned calves at Glenconglass. This year, we are going to make some good-quality silage there to keep the higher-performing stock.

Last year, our silages averaged around 9.4ME and just over 10% protein. This year, we are going for two cuts of silage to push quality up. It’s currently looking like we will be cutting the first cut between now and the Highland Show, once we get a weather window. This silage will be baled and wrapped as there is no silage pit at Glenconglass. Our silage at home will be a bit further away as the sheep grazed these fields after lambing, so it has only really started growing in the last week or so.

We do have a small area of rented land away from home where we grow some barley and take a bit of silage and with the conditions looking as well as they did over the last while, we cut the grass over there last week, planning to wilt it for a day and then bale it. Unfortunately, the weather has reverted to the norm and we are getting a bit frustrated waiting for a window to get it rolled up.

The spring cows are nearly finished calving, with all cows going about with calves at foot.

Moving the autumn cows and their calves about last week seemed a fine chance to put them across the scales and see how they were doing and we were fairly pleased with the performance of the calves. The calves averaged 284kg at 220 days old, so daily liveweight gain since birth has averaged 1.1kg a day.

We also decided this year to weigh the cows and see what sort of proportion of their body weight the cows are weaning. It has been an interesting exercise, with our heaviest cow weighing 732kg and our lightest cow weighing 516kg, quite a spread. The really interesting thing is that the calf from the lighter cow is 21kg heavier at 200 days than the calf from the heavier cow.

This has got us really thinking about what the right cow type is for our herd going forward. Looking at the results, the larger cows are rearing calves that are 24kg lighter than average yet cost 30p per day more to keep over the course of a year. Put these two facts together and the heavier cows are eating £90 more feed per year to rear calves that are worth £60 less than the calves from the medium sized cows in the herd.