What a Summer!

Sep 16, 2026

What a summer we have had!  Glorious sunshine that we all felt the relief of after a long winter.  As the warmth of the sun hit, not only did we breathe a sigh of relief but if felt like the animals did too.

We had a great Spring with successful calving and lambing.   Both lots of young are doing fantastic and growing well and all have nearly naturally weaned.

Hay time as always was very difficult, but it is great knowing that all the hard work in the summer is going to pay dividends in the winter.  The cows especially love the hay, and I can’t blame them, the barns are full of hay for the coming months and they smell lovely.  Thankfully we made the choice this year to make more hay than usual and what a blessing that decision was.

As much as we love the sunshine on the farm, all sunshine and no rain meant that our grass stopped growing.  Thankfully, as we are very careful about our stock numbers our fields managed to stay just about green, but we did need to use some of our hay we had just made.  Never before have we had to supplement summer feeding with hay.  Again, I’m very thankful for the decision we made to make more hay this year than usual.  What we had to use has not impacted the hay that we will need to see us through the winter months.

Not everything that we have done this summer has worked as well as liked.  We made the decision to combine our herd of cattle with the flock of sheep, I call them a flerd!  The cattle were great and once the sheep stopped making them jump, they settled well together.  Except once the sheep realised that the stone walls were mostly fenced with electric fencing to stop the cows rubbing on them and knocking them down, the sheep claimed a new found freedom.  The sheep can sneak under the fence climb over the wall and go and graze wherever they wished!  Not great for my grazing plan and certainly not great for the plants.  We made the decision to separate them from the cattle again in to the pastures that the sheep can’t escape from.  Additionally, we have had to change our fencing plans.  Instead of electric fencing on the walls we are having to use stock net instead.  We are just waiting to see if we have been successful in our funding application to protect and preserve the walls, which in turn will contain the sheep.

One thing that has worked way better than expected was splitting our larger fields in to smaller grazing pastures.  Each pasture is a days grazing for the cattle.  We split the fields using electric wire and the cattle are so well behaved they stay where we put them till the following day.   Splitting the fields like this has given us so much more control of the grazing and has increased the amount of rest each pasture gets between grazing.  It will be interesting to see how much more resilient to droughts our fields and grass will be over the next few years.

Our next upcoming task is to determine which animals will be ready to go to slaughter.  I know how so many of you are waiting for our next lot of meat to be ready.  As soon as I know, I’ll be sure to let you know so you can get your orders placed.  Thank you for your patience on this.