Golden sun gives spirits a timely lift
Like many men who have spent the better part of their lives working the land his age is undeterminable.
With a few bits and pieces he’s bought at SuperValu in Carrick he’s making his way in the sunshine back to his car when we meet.
“It’s come at last; and they reckon it could get real good by the middle of next week,” I say referring enthusiastically to the sunshine.
“Yes, and I’ve plenty of room in every field for it,” he replies smiling.
It was a very nice way of putting it, as though it might be just possible in some way to store the surplus. It’s odd that this very brief conversation is the one I remember most clearly from last weekend about the arrival of the long overdue “summer”.
It didn’t tell me anything in particular, others I would have would be punctuated with the verbal equivalent of bar charts and satellite photography, however, his confident tone seemed to impart a sense of fact, the weather was the way it was and it would stay that way until such time as he decided it would be some other way. And who was I to argue. Prior to the arrival of the sun I pulled out the cards on 15 bullocks and dispatched them to the local Dawn plant last week. While “big schleps” of cattle, their dead weights were with a few exceptions disappointing.
I commented a month ago that bullocks I had killed at that time were not quite up to the mark due in my opinion to the lack of thrive caused by the poor weather.
And, as we all know, the intervening weeks in the South and East has seen the weather continue, until last Friday, to be “unsettled” at best; so a continuation of poor thriving conditions for stock. Looking at the weights, I reckon my bullocks were 30 kilos dead weight light. They lacked “killing power”; a phrase that in my mind describes the complicated relationship between breed, age, conformation, feed quality and thrive.
The effects of poor feed quality or lack of thrive-inducing conditions leads very simply to poor carcase weight. While the majority of my animals looked the business with apparently good covers of fat and full chests, they just didn’t weight well. (My definition of weighting well is anything over 360 kilos cold). The ones that did were older, up to 38 months; the others just didn’t have it.
Surely, you say, I must have had some idea? Yes, I did. I knew from running them through the crush that they weren’t quite up to the mark, they had done well given weather, but that bloom you expect from really well thriving big bullocks was lacking.
Don’t get me wrong, the money was still very respectable, but it could have been better, as could the summer. That said, 2012 could yet redeem herself to some degree if this week is repeated. Whatever happens, in the farming sense 2012 will never be forgotten, because true, fair and honest it wasn’t.
