Sunshine and rain, as a farmer I need both, so the distinct lack of rain earlier this year caused problems. Farm springs dried up and pasture growth ground to almost a halt. Indeed, by mid-May the pastures were frizzling up on the shallower land. We had to down-size our stock or run out of pasture for the cattle, so I sold a large batch of our Aberdeen Angus cross cattle to a large, pasture fed, organic estate near St Andrews.
What happens to the calves who won’t join the milking herd is a question we get asked regularly on social media. Well, this is where they go. I visited the estate a couple of weeks ago and Barry, who used to work here, showed me how the cattle were settling in, and also the cattle we’d sold to them last year.
They were being mob stocked on lucerne-rich herbal leys, and they were literally gleaming! Their coats were shining and even the older ones came over and ‘spoke’ to me. I’d forked silage to them all the previous winter and I guess they remembered. There’s nothing like forking silage twice a day to 100 cattle to keep you fit!
Before leaving I visited the shop and bought an enormous rump steak that the butcher assured me was from one of our cattle. I shared it with a visiting friend a few days later and I assure you that animal had, had a happy life and did not die in vain.
But back to May. The pastures were going backwards, but rain was forecast, and you know what can happen in these parts once the rain starts... I decided to take what was there for an early silage cut. That meant I could then get the digestate (slurry from the anaerobic digester – a liquid compost that acts as a powerful fertiliser and soil conditioner) applied and washed in to boost yields for a second cut later in the summer. That first cut yield after a spring drought was just half what we normally get.
Well, the rain arrived, the farm springs recovered, the digestate got washed in and the pastures grew and grew. That let us get a second cut in mid-July with the hope of a third cut sometime in September. We had no more digestate so the pasture growth would be entirely dependent on the soil microbes harvesting nutrients to feed the plants. I know that sounds like a bit of a stretch, but the soil scientists are now able to see this happening in real time using electron microscopes and marker nutrients, in a healthy soil.
Anyhow, we’ve had a bit of rain since then and now heat and the silage pastures have, once again, grown like mad. So much so that I figure we’ll be able to get our third cut before the end of August. I can assure you we have never, taken a third cut or have been able to cut so early, even in the old days long ago of fertilisers and pesticides. This organic, regen, agroecological way of doing things certainly seems to work!
We weighed the calves the other day and, boy, they are doing well too. But you can see that just by looking at them. Gleaming coats and full of life. Some of these calves are growing at over 2kg a day, which is exceptional! All stock do well in dry weather. They don’t like the rain any more than we do. Even the lambs are thriving. They are so clean. No stomach worm problems. We seem to have got away from our dependency on worm drenches through rigidly adhering to never having calves or lambs in the same fields two years in a row.
I might live to regret saying this, but it will be 15 years since we had to dose cattle for stomach worms and 6 years for the lambs. Compare that to the days where we had to dose calves at least once a year and as for the sheep, we’d dose ewes before lambing, after lambing and lambs every six weeks from June to September. That’s a lot of time, money and chemicals being saved by harnessing natural processes. And nature on the farm is thriving as a result.
The local red squirrel conservation group have installed two pine marten nesting boxes and cameras on the farm, and we’ve just had our first glimpse of pine martens on the farm. They are being encouraged in our area because they are very effective at capturing grey squirrels, who are a bit slower and heavier than the reds. As greys start to encroach on the red squirrel population of this corner of Scotland, anything that can help safeguard the reds is worth a go.
We’ve also started working with a local beekeeper who has installed 10 bee hives on the farm. He was keen to emphasise that he won’t install too many because he doesn’t want to disrupt the resident populations of pollinators. As it has been a good summer for flowers and pollinators, we are looking forward to a jar or two of Rainton honey.
Bugs and beetles? The dung beetles are really thriving now that we don’t use the worm drenches that have been found to disrupt their life cycles. Dung beetles are the unsung heroes of regenerative farming. They break down the dung pats and incorporate dung into the soil for their larvae, cycling nutrients and carbon. When the badgers and rooks scrape among the dried-up dung pats for larvae, this acts as a dung-spreader, and the soil surface disruption stimulates the soil micro-biome. All good stuff.
And the green dock beetle and its larvae are having a whale of a time decimating the poor old docks. They graze the dock leaves leaving only the leaf veins which rapidly loose water in the dry periods. The leaves turn a rusty brown and shrivel up. This has been a most effective year for these beetles with these hot, dry spells of weather. Of course they won’t kill all the docks by any means, but they keep them in check, maintaining a balance, which is what it’s all about.
This summer has also been busy time for visits. We had a German film crew who were interested in our cow-with-calf system, and a couple of scientists doing a frog survey in one of our ponds on the nature trail. A two-day visit from a young farming family from Bath who are looking to start up a cow-with-calf and micro-cheese dairy on their mixed crop and livestock farm, a visit from the European Transform Dairy Network that we are working with, a local rambler’s group and a group of ecological students at Sparsholt University, London.
As for me, well Wilma’s passing in March after decades of fighting cancer on and off has left a gaping hole in my life. My regular walks down to her resting place in a shady dell, deep in the woods we planted, where we would sit at and share a bottle of wine in happier times, brings me peace.