It was more with hope rather than confidence that we tried the oilseed rape stubble with the plough to see if we could get the gluten-free oats sown in advance of the winter.

We set 15 November as the cut-off, but with that looming and a broken forecast, we reckoned that Thursday and Friday was our last realistic chance.

The stubble ground ploughed up far better than I had expected and after an hour drying, it looked fit to sow. By Friday afternoon everything was done including the headlands.

That’s the end of the tillage season – only the beans ground to follow wheat is left for next spring and we need to be careful with herbicide applications over the next few months.

At least everything is in the ground in reasonable conditions after one of the most difficult Octobers I can remember.

Will we be able to deal with the risk of take-all in the winter barley and barley yellow dwarf virus?

At this stage I don’t know. This year we are unlikely to use any aphicide, but that would obviously change with earlier sowing. In the meantime, while drains are back flowing again, there is no real evidence of unusual amounts of water, with ditches normally dry at this time of the year still dry.

Poor performance

We now have almost half the cattle in. As they came in, we weighed them and it’s very clear that the autumn performance at grass has been very poor.

The best has been on the reseeded ground, but I suspect we may have been grazing paddocks too tightly with a sward of limited nutritional value to start with.

I have not seen any guidance on how the botanical composition of swards and cattle performance varies depending on grazing intensity especially at the back end of the year.

It is noticeable that when the cattle come into the sheds after doing badly in the back end that there seems to be a compensatory type spurt in performance.

At this stage, we are still finishing off some of the autumn regrowths but on reckoning up the quantity of silage we have, we are definitely back in terms of tonnes compared with where we would like to be.

We will put off buying in cattle for the moment but will look around to see if there is any value in byproduct feeds that could stretch out our silage.