Grass growth has been poor over the last month and for the first time I can remember, we are considering housing cattle in the first week of September.

Normally I would expect to have the silage aftergrass growing vigorously at this stage, so that we could spread the cattle out across the place, but it’s too soon to let stock out on it yet.

We also bought in more cattle than normal during the grazing season, so the combination of a comparatively dry period and slightly higher numbers, as well as a slightly later than usual second-cut of silage, has left us short of grass at least for the moment.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, August is a critical month and in a tillage production sense, it went fully to plan.

By 1 September, all the spring oats and the spring barley had been harvested. The oaten straw was chopped, though this was probably a year when it could have been saved, while the spring barley straw is all in round 4x4 bales. The oilseed rape is well emerged, though with a lot of volunteer winter barley seedlings. We have never sown oilseed rape so early and we intend to give the Clearfield variety every chance to yield well. It has already got slurry incorporated in before sowing, slug pellets are spread and it will get a small amount of a boron-based fertiliser over the next day or so. At this stage we still have no definite yield weights, but from a preliminary view, it would look as if the spring gluten-free oats yielded better than any of the spring or, for that matter, winter barley.

Frank Hayes RIP

The enormous funeral held on Sunday in his native Ballinakill, Co Galway, of Frank Hayes, the longstanding head of communications at the Kerry Group, was a striking testimony to a man whose life touched many. I first got to know him when he was seconded from the Department of Agriculture to join the Irish embassy in London under the remarkable George Foster. Denis Brosnan then recruited him for the young Kerry Group and he was intimately associated with its extraordinary growth and development. Family, farming, sport and music were central in his life. He died too young, at just 66. May he rest in peace. Our deepest sympathy to his wife Gráinne and six children.