The few fine days over Good Friday and Easter Saturday allowed land to dry out enough for my contractor to come back and spread the wetter half of my farm with slurry using the pipeline and trailing shoe.

Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to get any fertiliser out yet and judging by the forecast, it’s not looking like there’ll be many opportunities over the next few days either.

The land that received slurry in early March has a nice cover of grass on it now, even with having store lambs on it until February, but, unfortunately, all cattle are still in the shed.

Too cold and wet

Calves, of course, have access to grass by day, but I haven’t managed to get anything else out yet, as things are just too cold and wet.

I really would like to get some cows out soon, as I stopped feeding meal to cows two months ago and although silage quality is good, some of the milkier cows are starting to look a little raggedy.

However, a few weeks at grass, will soon sort them out.

I toyed with letting some of these thinner cows out to grass over the weekend, but, again, the diabolical forecast for the week ahead dissuaded me.

Grazing lambs

As I’ve said before in this column, I sometimes question whether grazing store lambs over the winter is a good idea, as it leaves me without early spring grass.

But a cold wet spring like this one soon makes me realise, even if I had oceans of early grass, I couldn’t get out to graze it anyway.

And there definitely seems to be more springs like this in recent years than not.

Farm walk

On a more positive note, a huge congratulations to Neville Myles and the Myles family from Ballyshannon, Donegal, and to Gary Fisher of Teagasc and all the Teagasc staff involved in organising the recent suckler breeding farm walk on Neville's farm.

The organisational skills were so good, they managed to get a lovely dry sunny evening for the event. Neville informed me that he’d planned for the dry evening three weeks beforehand - tongue firmly placed in his cheek.

The Myles family is calving 60 spring-calving suckler cows and have 400 mid-season lambing ewes.

Bulls are finished under 16 months and heifers under 25 months. The farm is breeding its own replacements - a mix of Salers, Shorthorns and Limousins - and heifers are being calved at two years of age. There is excellent quality stock on the farm.

Topics covered were cow and bull star ratings and the understanding the sub-indices that make up these ratings.

The requirements for the new Suckler Carbon Efficiency Programme, sexed semen and synchronisation programmes were all discussed. It definitely provided some food for thought.