BY RICHARD TORY

I am desperately seeking some good weather. I cannot remember such a long and drawn out winter, with such extremes of temperature. Usually at this time of year the animals are being turned out in the fields, but at the moment that seems ages away.

We were lucky to get our spring barley sown in the ground before the first snow fall. Usually spring barley is planted into warm soil at the end of February or beginning of march and germinates pretty quickly and grows strongly. Generally the spring barleys are used for malting which makes your beers and whiskeys, so a poor quality crop means less quality grains for breweries and distilleries and an increase in price for the limited amount of quality grains. We will not know the quality of the crop until it is harvested and in the barn in August, and the grain merchants come and take samples running various germination tests. This year the snow could well damage any early plantings, like ours, but also there are many farmers locally that are still not in a position to drill the seed as the fields are too wet for the tractors and for the seed-drill to work cleanly.

Sheep and lamb prices have been very high at markets recently, probably about 30% higher than the average. The initial price rise seemed to occur at the time of the first snow-fall, shutting off some farms and closing markets, which created a shortage. They have held up for a few weeks now with Easter usually creating a price rise and a general shortage in good size animal available. We have started lambing at the farm, but we are not going to be creating any market fluctuations with our 15 Ewes! We have had two sets of triplets so far and two sets of twins, so hopefully it carries on with these good results.

Our main diversification of the year is fast approaching, Teddy Rocks festival is back on the first May bank holiday weekend raising money for helping children affected by cancer. We still have many hours of work to get everything set up and ready ; including fencing and walkways, I am relying on a turnaround in the weather pretty quickly so we can get some machinery across the fields to do these jobs. Fingers crossed!