Firstly I hope you’ve all had a good Christmas, as usual been a long time since I’ve updated this but there’s been a fair bit of change over the last 12 months which just seems to have flown by.
Contracting side.
Biggest change is after 8 years of being involved in chicken muck I decided to stop in July this year. Main reasons was some farms got sold off & the other owners weren’t organised at all & the other was the price they wanted for the muck was ridiculous - nearly 8 times more than what we were paying & our customers weren’t going to pay it so long story short I basically told them to stick it so we’ll now just do muck spreading & the odd bit of trailer work here & there.
Next thing was I sold the umbilical kit, we never used it since owning it & it was an insurance policy incase it was too wet for the tanker, however I got sick of looking at it & couldn’t see the point of having something sat in the yard for a ‘just incase’ scenario for mostly somebody else’s benefit. I also sold our 4000 gallon hispec tanker as we didn’t need to run 2 tankers anymore, and although the major is a 1000 gallons less, it’s got rear linkage etc whereas the hispec didn’t, so thought it was more future proof to hold onto the major rather than the hispec with no linkage.
Contracting kit wise going forward the only thing I can see me buying is a dribble bar for the major in the future, everything else will stay & just be maintained.
The lifelong plan with the contracting was to push/built it up the best I could, but to end up with some hopefully half decent kit which isn’t worn out & has no finance on it, which is what I’ve done & feel I’ve achieved everything (and more!) I set out to do with it just over 10 years ago, however moving forwards I can’t see much of a future. Kit price is gone through the roof along with the fuel, there’s less staff about who want to sit on tractors especially dealing with muck & it seems harder & harder to get paid for the work you’ve done, so now we’ll just spread for the the customers I’ve decided to keep using a couple of good self employed guys rather running round like idiots all summer chasing every last ton of muck because the overheads/runnings costs were so much higher - trying to work smarter & all that but also freeing up some time for me to focus on other things which will be below.
Trucks.
Both blue dafs will be up for sale in the new year (bargain to be had if anyone is interested!) As they have both been replaced by other trucks, first one is a 2018 410hp Volvo Fmx
Second one (any probably my favourite!) is a 2018 500hp Scania XT
Both have been on muckaway/aggregate work for 10 months now & seems to be going well, nice to have steady day in day out not weather depending work unlike the ag contracting, can’t see me expanding it massively but will see what opportunities come up.
Farm.
I’ve increased the cattle up to 44 inc young stock & a bull, which some came from the same place as the original lot, and the others come off the Scottish highlands which are with the bull first & due to calve in June.
The amount of interest locally is unreal, we set up a Facebook page due to the interest:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100080770879187
and still get people standing looking/taking pictures of them for hours on end along with people wanting to come to see them. The first ones should be ready to go in about 8 months time which means we’ll start getting sorted/prepared for that early next year. The plan is to covert a shipping container into somewhere the beef boxes can be packed, labelled etc & also collected. This is what I want to push/focus on more, offering something different to others direct to the customer & already have a waiting list for meat boxes.
I’m on the hunt for a second hand (ideally) spread a bale for next winter, bedding up by hand is a pain & time consuming, and whilst we out winter them, they can come in & out of sheds as they want so a spread a bale should make the job a bit easier & quicker.
Fencing wise we’ve now completed the boundary of 100ac where our yard is & the cattle are at the moment, the new year will consist of doing all the internal fences on that block of ground before we move to the other block of 120ac mid next year to do all those fences - think we’ve got about another 10000m to go. However, not one to do things the same as everyone else, due to the way tb is going we badger netted the whole boundary where our yard is & will be doing the same on the other block of ground. I think locally people probably think I’ve lost the plot, but not one to worry what others think I ploughed on & bought a protect post knocker for the doosan & started digging!
Not many thought it would work, we have no badgers on our land but to put it bluntly, we get raped by the neighbours badgers either side one of which has had major tb problems. The idea is the wire is like an L shape, with the bottom part of the L buried to stop them digging under & the wire spacing being much closer together so they can’t push through, and the results have been incredible. We used to have grass fields which looked like they had been ploughed, but since the new fence has been installed there’s been no activity at all, we’ve been putting cameras up to monitor as we went along & there’s been none come in since the fences went up so although much more time consuming to erect than a normal fence, the benefits long term will be worth it reducing the risk of tb as we won’t buy anymore cattle in, only a bull will be changed when he comes round onto his daughters.
Moving forwards as mentioned before we’ve got a fair bit of fencing to do. We’ve got one cattle shed to put up in the new year along with planning granted for 2 more sheds & muck store which were meant to be pig sheds, but due to the pig industry going the way it has I can’t see me doing that now so I think I’ll end up using them for cattle instead, although I can’t see them going up for at least another year. Im also on the hunt for a tractor drawn stock box which seem like rocking horse poo second hand, I had a price for a new Stewart & fell over due to the price, whilst I’m sure they’re worth it I can’t justify one on the amount of moving about we’ll do so considering a Rolland drop to the floor type.
As mentioned at the start there’s been a fair bit of change over the last 12 months, moving forwards I’ll maintain the contracting work we currently do but not really push to take on more which will allow me to focus more on the farm & the plans I’ve got for it, which may take a couple of years to get it to where I’d like but hopefully one day get there! I should also have more time now to keep this updated more often, although it’ll probably be more farm/kit related rather than contracting/kit related if that’s of any interest!
It will be a hell of a lot of hard work, I’m just hoping it’ll be less stressful than it was trying to build the contracting business up 🤣