We have had a busy few days in the yard lately.

All the mature ewes have been vaccinated with a clostridial booster at this stage. We have also been cleaning out the pens in the shed as the ewes were moved out of them.

As the ewes were going through the handling unit, we put them through the footbath. Any ewes that were lame were marked and treated. I plan to move all these ewes into the same pen this week to reduce exposure to the other ewes in the shed.

I plan on running any ewes that went lame this winter completely separately after lambing until recovered, with those that don’t recover being removed from the system.

As farmers, we need to work smarter rather than harder and removing the constant offenders from the flock should reduce my workload.

On the grass front, growth is very slow, with only 5kg DM/ha/day being recorded last week. Given that ground conditions are still very wet in parts and soil temperature was only 3.3°C, I’m not very surprised.

As a result, the ground I had planned to put the first batch of ewes to lamb on hasn’t produced a good enough cover over the winter so I have decided to change the area that they will be put on. There should be a good enough cover on the first piece by the time the next group is due to lamb.

As Alison and the children had a few days off school for mid-term, we decided to head up to Sligo for a minibreak before the spring workload increases. I spent much of my childhood on holidays with family up there. This is a wonderful part of the country to explore with the children, especially if the weather is favourable.

The farmer in me is always looking out over the ditches to see what is happening in the different parts of the country as I travel along the roads in the car. As wet as ground is at home, it is nothing compared to the ground we passed on our trip up to Sligo, with only a very rare dry field being spotted from time to time.

I am no expert on climate change, but it very definitely is something that is happening. We are going to have to change the ways we farm the land in this country. We will have to re-evaluate how viable it is to maintain traditional farming systems as margins are continually squeezed and more people move away from areas for better job opportunities.

There has been some negative press lately about farmers planting trees in areas where ground is not productive enough to generate an income from other farming means. What are the landowners supposed to do?

It strikes me that there are people with lots of opinions that perhaps live in the ideal world but we are farming in the less-than-ideal weather conditions and have to tailor our methods and crops to suit these.

Read more

Farmer Writes: drought challenges when milking cows in South Africa

Farmer Writes: Deere to my soul