Farmer Focus: A Rolls-Royce for the price of a top bull
Bob and Kay Adams ©Angus Findlay The snow has left, but the frost is lingering. It is good in some ways, as we have managed to muck out the cattle courts and spread the dung without making too much mess.
But this iciness is no use when you’re trying to work with eight Limousin bulls that you’ve entered for the February sales in Stirling.
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This year celebrates 150 years of the bull sales, which first started in the famous Perth market. Newhouse has been selling there for the past 76 years, gaining our first championship in 1955 and setting a new British record of 11,500gns for an Aberdeen Angus bull.
Bob’s late grandfather used to say: “Your top bull would buy you a Rolls-Royce and the average would get you a Jag.” How times have changed.
The Bluefaced Leicester ewes were scanned and are full of lambs, 275% at scanning is not a lambing we look forward to.
Calving is going well and we’re halfway through. The calving probes have have been a huge asset, paying for themselves yet again.
We’ve had a few upside-down presentations, but with the aid of the probe data we have managed to assist at calving earlier than we would normally, resulting in live calves.
Lamb prices have been buoyant and cull ewes even healthier, sadly we only had a few ewes left to sell as we sold them earlier. A crystal ball would have been useful.
The lambs have been grading well and killing out even better, some a bit heavy – but better than selling the heavy ones live.
All of the lambs are on the field neeps, and no concentrates have been fed yet. The hill ewes have returned to the glen very fit from their tupping visit and are on the heather until scanning.
James was a great help spreading the dung over his Christmas school holidays, but the last load seemed to give him memory loss. With the spreader floor left on, the result was a choked dung spreader.
A lot of bad language between brothers and the obstruction was freed. As our grandfathers always said, the only way to learn is by your mistakes…
Bob and Kay Adam
Bob and Kay Adam run 100 pedigree Limousin and Charolais cows on their 222ha family farm in Angus and rent a 728ha hill farm running 640 ewes and 30 suckler cows.