HEREFORD TOPPER
before we close up, in case we got a few very dry days and some of the slurry might stick to any new growth, and might contaminate our silage.
We also let up a field for hay and it got 3cwt/acre of 24-2.5-10.
Our winter barley has got two applications of fertiliser so far. At this stage we are up to about 100 units per acre. We will probably go to somewhere around 140-150 units per acre.
Barley
Luckily, we got a chance to spray the winter barley for weeds in the autumn but, as of yet, it hasn’t got its first fungicide.
We sowed our spring oats three weeks ago and it has emerged as a lovely even crop.
We haven’t sown any spring barley yet. The seed and manure is in the shed waiting to go and the fields are ploughed. Hopefully we will get to that this week.
We sowed our 200m of GLAS hedging in the middle of March and it appears to be bursting into life, with plenty of leaves emerging so hopefully it will now power ahead.
In the next month, we also need to re-sow our wild bird cover for the coming year.
We are continuing to sell our beef heifers to the factory, with about half of them gone at this stage. It’s good to see the price starting to rise a bit, not before time.
It’s important that all straw-bedded sheds are properly cleaned out at this time of year, to break the cycle of infection, especially since some cows with young calves will spend time in these sheds in July-August.
I notice ICBF are getting a bit of stick at the moment about the change in value of EBIs. As someone who is trying to buy replacement heifers in the mart at the moment, I wish that, when the decision was taken to show the star ratings on some of the boards in the marts, that all the ratings should have been put up, not just those with 4- and 5-stars.
As things stand, it has just created an elite group of expensive heifers.
Whereas, by ICBF’s own admission, a 3-star heifer could actually turn out to be as good as a 5-star.
So we don’t know whether any heifer that doesn’t have a star rating is 1-star or 3-star. It appears to me that the technology is there and the information is there. All that it takes is for someone to take the decision to do it.