51AVÊÓƵ

Oh what a three months it's been; Inheritance Tax, BPS slashing, capital grants ‘paused', the removal of commercial vehicle status on double cab pick ups and let's not forget the Bovaer foray

As I look back, 2024 was a year of lots of change for me, my business and farming in general in more ways than one

We were lucky enough to have a relatively quiet and drama-free Christmas period on the farm, with some drier weather helping

As with all farmers, the weather is one of our biggest influences on nearly everything we do

As I write this at the beginning of November, we are currently in the midst of doing our maize in Cheshire.

Another year, another calving block comes to an end, filled with a few surprises and challenges but mainly positive memories

It has been a busy couple of months through our calving period, with 360 calvings in eight weeks

As I flew home from my nine weeks of individual Nuffield travel in New Zealand, China, Chile and North America, studying the topic of ‘Inspiring the next generation of dairy entrepreneurs', I found myself asking: 'What have I learned?'

I would like to start my first column by talking about what is going well, and what is not going so well, which is how we open things up at the robotics milking discussion group I am involved with

In my last column, I wrote about how we were embracing a zero-grazing system, which initially increased our milk yield but significantly added to our workload. Forget that! A few weeks later, yields dipped, grass quality was poor and we were fed up with the extra tractor work and scraping copious amounts of muck. Also, it eventually stopped raining