When is a subsidy an incentive?

England’s restrictions on Covid are now lifted and life is pretty much back to normal for Robert Hodgkins.

WE ARE ENJOYING GOOD GRAIN prices and good lamb prices at the moment – our last load of lambs went for an average NZ$240, average 19kg deadweight. However, fert has more than doubled from last year, electricity and fuel are up 20% and we have had our first reduced subsidy payment as it heads down to £0 over the coming years.

So almost to the pound there is no change in fortunes – just extra requirement on the overdraft to fund the fert increase until we can sell some of this expensive grain, with Putin on the border of Ukraine UK futures wheat has shot up, harvest delivery grain is sitting at about $370 a tonne (August 2022).

For all the talk about the United Kingdom farming without subsidy we’re seeing area-based payments turn into ‘sustainable farming incentive’ payments. It appears our business will go from claiming a payment on a scheme to seven payments on several schemes which could replace the previous subsidy payment between them – crazy.

Even crazier we’ve seen climate change protesters take to glueing themselves to the 10- lane main circular motorway around London.

We’ve had a couple of physical setbacks this winter, we cannot get our planning application for our dairy building through the local authority and both of our shepherds have moved on within a month of each other, both wanted to head nearer home. We were really sad to see them go so we’ve been recruiting hard and had some great applicants, we’ve managed to replace them both and we’re excited to see what Fraser and Robbyn will bring to the business.

Our arable manager and his wife have welcomed a beautiful baby boy to the world and hopefully by the time you read this Monty will have passed his BASIS (professional agronomy qualification) exams.

Sheep scanning is done with 174 on the ewes. Looks like we have 3080 lambs hitting the ground in April.

Romney ewe lamb scan is down at 91%, we usually do 120. Recorded ewe lambs were way too small and looked like they were struggling. I buggered up and tried to do some smart breeding and matching ewe traits with ram traits, but had to run ewes and lambs together to avoid having mega amounts of groups. Lambs definitely suffered running on less good ground.

The commercial Romney ewes’ lambs on turnips were almost too fat with some of them shearling size.

Pure Romney ewes managed 173% overall with a lot of two-tooths in the mix.

As a general impression ewe condition score is very good across the whole flock, we are in really good shape going into the spring – I just have to make sure I don’t do anything stupid over the next six weeks!

Our Mzuri drilled cereal crops have come out of winter well, we are starting on the spring drilling shortly, spring barley, then on to the peas, the borage and then the quinoa.

As mentioned earlier we are cutting back a little on fert this year, most of the spring barley will be going into ground that has had sheep on it this year so we are hoping the sheep grazing will have given us 20-30kg/ha of N. To try and quantify that we have invested in a Trimble greenseeker for the tractor which is Trimble’s version of an N sensor (it’s a camera-mounted sensor that “sees” how green the crop is and then adjusts the fert requirement “on the move”). At the very least it is a new toy for Monty to play with. In financial terms it’s probably unlikely to save us much N but it will target what we have at the points in the field that need it.