Winter – All the cattle are indoors.

They wander in and out of their straw beds to eat silage at the trough or find a spot to catch some winter sun or munch on their cake at the feed stations.

Winter is a time for extra jobs/ building maintenance and planning, as nothing can happen in the fields.

Autumn is when the maize gets harvested by the forage harvester and is treated the same as the grass.

The ground gets cultivated and cereal crops sown for the following summer towards the end of autumn.

As the weather turns colder and wetter, all the cattle come inside to their straw barns for winter.

We have a group of heifers to calve later in the autumn to have more milk over the Christmas period.

Summer – harvest cereal crops – barley, oats and wheat, baling up all the straw into round bales to use as cows’ bedding for the winter.

We like to attend county shows with the cows for a bit of fun, often with great success.

All the young stock, dry cows and milking cows are still grazing the fields.

We make hay for the dry cows to eat in winter.

Spring – once the ground has dried up, we apply fertiliser to the fields to encourage the grass to grow and then the cows are turned out to graze.

They are out as long as there’s grass to eat and the weather is kind. We sow spring wheat and barley and maize in fields that may have been too wet to plant in autumn.

The yards are mucked out for the last time and this muck rots down in a pile ready to be spread on the fields as natural fertiliser.

Once the grass is ready, grass silage season begins- grass is mown, rowed up and then the forage harvester picks the grass up, finely chops it and blows into a fleet of trailers that tip it into a big pile ready to store and ferment for the winter.

We like to get 3-4 cuts of grass.