Unfortunately, my mind is starting to turn towards winter housing and what I need to do to get sheds ready for winter.

Hopefully, the weather will do the decent thing, give us a good back end to the year and we’ll have weeks of grazing ahead of us yet.

Whether it does or it doesn’t, I’ll still have a few things to do to before cattle are housed.

Slurry tanks

The first thing I need to do is check my slurry tanks.

As far as I was concerned, I had my tanks emptied by the end of April, all on with the trailing shoe and pipe in the muggy spring weather making the best use of my nitrogen and that was me finished with slurry for the year.

But seeing as I had 40 cattle housed for three weeks in June and a pen of bulls that were only killed out of the shed in mid-July, there might be more slurry in the tanks than I think.

That’s job number one.

Wash the sheds

Job number two is probably to think about washing the sheds.

I’m never a great person for getting the shed washed as soon as the cattle go out in the spring.

Partly because I just couldn’t be bothered at that time of year and partly because I quite often seem to end up rehousing cattle at some point during the grazing season due to bad weather.

That, coupled with the fact that the feed barriers in one of my sheds are all head-locking barriers, and it is much quicker and easier to dose, scan and do whatever other management tasks that need to be carried out during the grazing season in the head lockers rather than in the crush, means that cattle can be in and out of the house several times even in the best of summers.

So, I’m usually running last-minute, washing the shed as the cattle are waiting to get in.

As I don’t get the satisfaction of looking at a nice clean shed all summer, the main reason for washing them was to get rid of as many bacteria and as much infection as possible so that calves were being born into a safe, clean environment.

Seeing as I don’t calve cows anymore, I’m wondering do I really need to wash the sheds or not.

I know plenty of good farmers who don’t and seem to get away fine. Maybe I’m just getting lazy.

My main sheds were designed for suckler cows and consist of a 16ft slatted pen with a creep area at the back.

Making a splash guard

The creep area was used to obviously creep the calves and also to calve the cows on.

The drinkers in these sheds are placed between the creep and the slatted area so that one drinker can service both pens.

When I was calving cows, the creep was always well bedded with plenty of straw, but last year it didn’t need to be bedded at all.

It was only then that I realised that when the cattle on the slats are drinking, they are splashing a huge amount of water into the creep area, soaking the concrete and generally creating a mess.

Something they genuinely seem to take a bit of pleasure out of.

So, job number three will be to try to manufacture some kind of splash guard that will stop this happening, but still allow access to the drinker from both sides. Patent pending.