It’s a cold wet day on our farm in Warwickshire but it is January! so what’s happening on our farm.

We have had a great autumn for sowing the crops and we have wheat, barley, rape and beans all looking very well, it was the best autumn I can remember and we are hoping for a favourable growing season so that we can achieve good yields.

Our ewes had a difficult summer because we didn’t have enough grass for them; the lambs were fattened by feeding them throughout the summer with most of them sold by the end of July. When the lambs were weaned, the ewes were very thin, but by the autumn with plentiful grass, they gained weight. They still have plenty of grass now as shown in the photo.

Our 250 ewes are due to lamb at the end of February and at Christmas they were scanned (using ultrasound) so that we know how many lambs each ewe is carrying. This has two main advantages, firstly at lambing time we house the ewes in pens according to how many lambs they will have which helps when they lamb. Secondly, we can feed the ewes according to the number of lambs they are carrying, so the triplets have the most food and the singles have the least. This means that the triplet lambs are a good size when they are born, but the singles are not too large.

The cattle are all inside now, we have 93 calves which were born in August; they will go out to graze in late April, spend the summer at grass before returning inside next November. 51 of these calves are Aberdeen Angus cross Friesian and are shown in the photo below they are registered for Tesco’s Aberdeen Angus beef scheme.

The rest of the cattle are British Blue cross Friesian, and these black and white cattle are shown in the photo below.

We also have 98 cattle which are 18 months old, these will be sold in the late spring for beef. We brought them inside in early November, but unfortunately, due to the dry summer, they did not weigh as much as in previous years. Therefore, we are feeding them more barley this winter to try and increase their weight gain. Some of the older cattle in the photo below:

The winter weather has not been good for cattle with the fluctuations in temperature and high humidity giving them mild pneumonia, fortunately they have been vaccinated and so far all the poorly cattle have recovered.

The final aspect of our business is selling hay to customers with horses. Due to the dry summer our supplies are limited and we are running out. To ensure that we can continue to keep all our existing customers supplied we are having to import hay from France!

Let’s hope that yields are better this year.