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Plans are worthless but planning is invaluable. So said an old sage at some point in history. It could have been Rome, Greece, or possibly at the sheep sale in New Ross last Monday.
Sketching out progress, calculating inputs and estimating outputs makes you look at various different aspects of the farm. The pessimist and optimist views are both considered, and you come away from such planning with a more rounded opinion of the world. This can only be a good thing.
The resultant plan, however, will usually become redundant as variables that are unknowable in advance subsequently come into play and force you to improvise.
As another man in New Ross said: “Man plans and the gods laugh.”
Full audit
This is the scenario we find ourselves in with our early lambing plan. I thought we had enough ground closed on time back in October so that we would have grass available to see us through until March. But keeping an extra 40 of the 2019 ewe lambs over the winter months has seriously dented this plan. It is very obvious when you say it out loud, but 40 lambs averaging 40kg to 50kg each will get through a fair amount of grass, especially when that same grass is not growing back!
Eight of these are now gone to a local butcher, but they ate their fill before they went. The 32 remaining are now housed and slowly working through small square bales of hay. Seven more will go to the same butcher in the coming weeks and all going well, the 25 remaining will stay contented inside until the grass starts to grow again in March. They will be sponged and go to the rams in July with the mature ewes.
So, the plan was wrong but thankfully the planning and thinking about the entire change of system was useful nonetheless.
In short, it made us do a full audit of the farm in terms of housing, fencing (or lack thereof), grass grown in different fields in 2019, ewe breed, type of terminal ram to complement the ewe, and a host of other aspects. Of course, I looked at all these before but never with such a critical eye.
I have a better understanding now of what we are capable of and what we need to do to get there, plus the extra costs it would take and the market uncertainty that could throw the whole lot out the window.
I might have got the fine details of the first year’s plan wrong, but the planning gave me a much better grasp of where we are at in the grand scheme of things.
Political evolution
Lastly, I would like to wish the best of luck to all of our recently elected TDs. We get the politicians we deserve so for better or worse, we should support whatever Government is eventually formed. If you are not happy, then now is the time to start planning your own campaign and stand yourself in the next general election. Bear in mind though that Ireland is changing. It started with the same-sex marriage referendum, continued when the Eighth Amendment was repealed and abortion was introduced, and now the new Ireland shows itself in the rise of Sinn Féin and other broad societal opinions.
Climate change may be the biggest challenge that lies ahead for farming, but we will adjust and evolve as we have always done.
Together with the new CAP, our elected politicians have a massive role to play in how this evolution is managed.
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