"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Cheers mate (y) good honest feedback is always appreciated. They sound pretty good by all accounts!

Likewise I was surprised (pleasantly) with these wee dorper crosses, shot out of the ewe lambs like an oiled egg and just grew and grew.... they are quite low all the same, I remember looking at one early on and thinking it looked stunted til I picked him up and felt the weight - much solider.

Mind you tipping the ram over to check his feet or put a harness on is a fair act :ROFLMAO: and the bugger can jump a gate - must be c.30% goat in them :D
Screenshot_20180614-024150.jpg

Not hard to pick the odd one out :facepalm:
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
nice pen of lambs kP
Thanks, I actually got quite a buzz - my first ever pen of lambs! (y)
the mate I get my sheep from called in today and saw the sheep in the yard, safe to say his jaw dropped to see the size of his "rejects" - :eek::eek: to the point he didn't recognise them as the same lambs.

I feed everything to capacity, even when short on feed nothing goes hungry for long.
I don't know how sensible it is to farm with an abundance mentality but .... .. .. it is what it is :)

"there is more along shortly"
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
The only thing so far is that quite a lot of the lambs (early March born ) are shedding so i expect the kiling ones of those ( whethers and any ewe lambs not kept as replacements ) will be devalued slightly because of the skin value...
but anyway they will / have shown less (none actually) blowfly trouble in those lambs like the adults of course
.and the ewe lambs will be good shedders as adults i wouldve thought, so proves the ram i bought was good in that respect also...(i think)
In the field the lambs look leggy but when handled you cant feel their backbone atm they look different/nice close to in the yard....

Firstly i want good females (that i can breed myself) anyway for my flock replacement so good genetics for having lambs /rearing ...worm resistance ...good legs feet .mouths .
and shedding could be a big bonus but thats so new to me it will take a year or 2 to see on that score ...
I definitely like them thus
far
They sound good im almost sure there will be an exlana here for tupping time i just need to go see some locally before buying one. Thanks for the honest feedback very helpful (y)
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
Some people here might have some thoughts on this or at least find it interesting. I took on a really rough block of grazing this summer and there are a lot of overgrown willow hedges that are now basically lines of trees that have fallen over. Ive put all my empty ewe lambs there as well as quite a lot (thanks to the crappy spring :shifty:) of ewe lambs that lambed and arent rearing anymore. Some if them looked quite poor when i turned them there thanks to the stress of trying to rear lambs in mud and snow so im guessing they weret feeling to great. They are looking much better now though and sheared suprisingly well after a rest on this rough ground.
This mob if sheep have stripped every willow leaf within 4 foot of the ground and even nibbled at the twigs on the ends of the branches. And there was a lot of them but every one is bare. Were they self medicating on the willow? Asprin comes from willow trees (salicyllic acid? I could be completley wrong though) ive never seen sheep eat willow like that before i have some about and they rarely touch it or at least not like they have here.
 

Bury the Trash

Member
Mixed Farmer
Some people here might have some thoughts on this or at least find it interesting. I took on a really rough block of grazing this summer and there are a lot of overgrown willow hedges that are now basically lines of trees that have fallen over. Ive put all my empty ewe lambs there as well as quite a lot (thanks to the crappy spring :shifty:) of ewe lambs that lambed and arent rearing anymore. Some if them looked quite poor when i turned them there thanks to the stress of trying to rear lambs in mud and snow so im guessing they weret feeling to great. They are looking much better now though and sheared suprisingly well after a rest on this rough ground.
This mob if sheep have stripped every willow leaf within 4 foot of the ground and even nibbled at the twigs on the ends of the branches. And there was a lot of them but every one is bare. Were they self medicating on the willow? Asprin comes from willow trees (salicyllic acid? I could be completley wrong though) ive never seen sheep eat willow like that before i have some about and they rarely touch it or at least not like they have here.
More likely the tanins .... they fancied :unsure::yuck: imo. same self medicating purpose agree tho ir.




They sound good im almost sure there will be an exlana here for tupping time i just need to go see some locally before buying one. Thanks for the honest feedback very helpful (y)
I have shorn my rams this afternoon 6 of them not a lot of wool def. not worth a lot on the Suftex and the Texels not much more.In my mid fifties with some creaky bones, so the 7th Ram (the Exlana ) was a pleasure not to have to shear .:)
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Too right (y)
It is difficult for many to grasp that the things they do in the course of their "management" have so many negative consequences on the very things that would be able to assist.

It is a sad world in many respects; and our tendency to kill first, ask questions later, drives me wild.

Then again, I trap possums ferrets and stoats, so who am I to judge?
 

Farmer Roy

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
NSW, Newstralya
farmers seem to spend so much of their time just killing things . . .

an explosion or overpopulation of any organism shows that the system is out of balance

I keep reading about direct drilling on tff - people who say it will save the world & others who say it doesn't work
both are wrong
however, I also keep reading about the sheer quantities of fungicides used in uk arable cropping. FUNGICIDES. Just stop & think about that. Stop & think about the many valuable, crucial roles fungi play in soil health, plant health, animal health & ultimately our health. Then lets go do our 4th T2 or whatever its called, or another prophylactic "earwash" spray, just in case
FUNGICIDES . . .
Then they wonder why there are issues with stubble retention, decomposition of organic matter, soil health, compaction, infiltration, water holding capacity, dry weather ( FFS ), slugs etc ????
No point explaining the VITAL role of fungi in soil here - if you don't already know at least something about it you shouldn't be farming
but, the implications spread further than ( just ? ) soil health.
insects can cause big problems in agriculture, yes
guess what ? MOST diseases of insects ( that help to keep their populations in control ) are fungal . . .
so, by using fungicides, not only are there all the negative impacts on soil health, but you are also having an impact on pest insect populations. Slug pellets anyone ??
Sometimes I just read TFF & wonder why ?
WTF ?
And they think they are the BEST, they are the PINNACLE & anyone who suggests there may be different ways, cheaper ways, more effective ways, regenerative ways, is just some greeny lefty hippy with no idea, intent on destroying them, or some jealous foreign competitor who obviously isn't as productive as them & needs to belittle them as much as possible because they cant compete on yield or whatever dick waving measure they use
TBH - ive had a gutfull of the self righteousness, the moaning, the whining, the exceptionalism. From the lot. The ploughers, the DD ( they seem so amateurish & naïve in many ways, bless'em ). All solutions can only be bought, sprayed or spread, from an oilbasedpetrochemicalindustialsyntheticenergyhungry source, reductionist mindset
 
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Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
My own view is that lives are actually really quite cheap on a piece of land - death preservation of empty spaces are where the costs actually lie.

It ties in well with what we are discussing here; monoculture and lack of development in harvesting techniques have led to the "job's fooked" side of cropping.
Monoculture and lack of selective breeding has led to the "job's fooked" of livestock.

So, the more "hands off" we can be, the better our chances?
 

Ukjay

Member
Location
Wales!
It does appear to be quite a contentious thing farming, if one dares to think outside of the box!

From my own outside in look, there appears to be a lot of resistance to what I beleive I can see as being the required changes needed, so I often ponder where things are heading and for just how much longer it can last as it is, obviously in my own little world to avoid further confrontation.

I personally cannot see it being able to continue much longer in the current state, so going to be interesting to see how things pan out.
 

Henarar

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Somerset
Too right (y)
It is difficult for many to grasp that the things they do in the course of their "management" have so many negative consequences on the very things that would be able to assist.

It is a sad world in many respects; and our tendency to kill first, ask questions later, drives me wild.

Then again, I trap possums ferrets and stoats, so who am I to judge?
Don't you find as you get older you are less inclined to want to kill anything, I swerved for a caterpillar crossing the road the other day, bloody great hairy thing he was :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
I totally agree with you there @Ukjay
I think you would have to be a few shingles short to think that the problems created by thinking about money will be solved by money; the problems we created by chemical abuse will be solved by more chemicals... and so on.

Put it another way, Adolf Hitler was condemned for simply attempting to treat people the way a farmer operates - first of all create a problem, blame it on someone else, then kill anything that doesn't conform to your ideals - and he was actually 'certifiably' insane.

Yet this is everyday food production, no diversity allowed (unless someone is going to pay me for it)

It is a very broken model, fortunately for us down here we aren't in a mollycoddled bubble and if you break the laws of the land you are soon an ex-farmer.
Like Adolf.

So intervention is already quite limited compared to much of the rest of the world, and yet I still want less of it than my neighbours do. The returns really aren't there to spent my best years bent over sheep or running cattle through a race - so the less I have to mollycoddle them to produce saleable items, the better for me.

The last time I worked out my hourly rate, it was around $180/hour.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

  • 0 %

    Votes: 80 42.3%
  • Up to 25%

    Votes: 66 34.9%
  • 25-50%

    Votes: 30 15.9%
  • 50-75%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 75-100%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

    Votes: 7 3.7%

Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

  • 1,293
  • 1
As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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