I watch the difficult harvest many of you are having in the UK and you have my best wishes in what is a very tough season. I really feel for those still battling to get their crop off.

Here at Valetta, we have bounced out of winter into a “growthy” mild spring. Across Canterbury we could easily end up in a dry growing season, but we are off to a better-than-expected start.

Fortunately, we have received more winter rain than areas north and south of us, and now with a mild start to the spring, feed has grown quickly giving us ample supply for our store lambs as we enter the final six weeks to finish them to processing weights.

See also: Combining almost complete in a variable harvest

About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

Read more articles by David Clark

Currently, we are run-off-our-feet busy. Lambing is going well, store lambs are all shorn and now out on grass seed crops, and we should be finished spring planting by 5 October.

We have filled our spring crop rotation with some specialist seed crops.

Whether it be the infrastructure we can provide, our soils and irrigation or our long-standing loyalty to seed firms, we are grateful to have sufficient options in what is a challenging global market.

Added to our busyness is the madness of also building a house during spring.

This project is an additional staff home for a young lady from Lincolnshire who has joined our team as a shepherd.

We have chosen to build it “labour only” with a local builder who has helped us on various projects for the past 28 years.

We are managing the supply of materials and sub-contractors, doing all the groundworks ourselves and generally at least one of us is working alongside the builder each day.

We enjoy being involved and we feel that taking responsibility for these projects and rolling our own sleeves up to help, gives us good cost control.

The end result will be fantastic, but gosh I will be pleased when we can turn the speed dial down just a little.