We've been at it again - this time we caught up Michael from Newtown. Just in case you missed the article in the December edition of Y Tir, you can also have a snoop with us here:
Who is Michael?
Michael Davies, 27, and his fiancé, Emma Baker, 23, started their farming career four years ago by taking up their first tenancy at Caerafon farm, a Powys council owned 71 acre holding in Caersws near Newtown. Alongside this the couple rent an additional 53 acres privately, taking their farmed land up to 123 acres. Both, Michael and Emma, are first time farmers with neither of them coming from farming parents.
Michael attended Coleg Powys agriculture department in Newtown after finishing high school alongside working on various farms until gaining the tenancy of Caerafon in 2013.
On farm Michael keeps 320 ewes, 40 ewe lambs and 4 suckeler cows. The sheep comprise of 200 Welsh Mule and Texel cross February lambing ewes. These are mated with blue Texel rams to produce quality early season lambs. Michael also keeps 20 pedigree blue Texel ewes and 100 improved Welsh ewes, which are mated with the blue faced Leicester to produce Welsh mule ewe lambs to sell in the Welshpool society sale and also replacements for his own mule flock.
The cattle are pure Limousin and British blue cross Limousin which are artificially inseminated by Limousin bulls to produce a high value calf.
What's happening on farm?
I spend about 50 percent of my time working for local farms and contractors, with the remainder being spent on my holding. Emma works full time as a teaching assistant in a local school and helps out on the farm when needed.
As the weather has taken a turn for the worse, this week I have been getting the sheds ready to house the cattle and lowland ewes after scanning in early December.
Final touches are being applied to our lambs that will be heading to the Royal Welsh Winter Fair, so fingers crossed for a successful show! I have started the Christmas lambing ewes with high energy blocks and they will be fed nuts from next week; these are our broken mouth ewes that we lamb early in order to sell the ewes as culls and prime lambs at Easter for hopefully a premium price!
As far as the rest of the sheep are concerned the ram lambs have been pulled out from the ewes to allow them a well-earned break, with the older rams left in and mixed up to clear up the stragglers. This year we used teasers on both flocks with amazing success with over 85 percent of ewes marked in the first 14 days - let’s hope the weather is on our side come the spring!
Hopefully this will compact our lambing in order to reduce labor and make worming and lamb health management easier, as lambs will be all of a similar age.
Off the home farm, I have recently started working on a dairy farm and have learned to milk which I’m finding very interesting. I also attend Llidiartywaen Young Farmers club, where I am chairman. Unfortunately I’m in my last year but would highly recommend joining the YFC to anyone as it has defiantly opened up a lot of windows for me and helped me to get to where I am today.
What challenges lie ahead?
The biggest challenges I think young farmers face today is being able to access land, most of which is snapped up by larger farms at a high rent which out-prices someone wanting to get get started in farming. Trying to maintain a steady cash flow is extremely hard when you are expanding or starting off and don’t have any of last year’s profit to use. The massive cost of buying machinery (luckily I have some very good neighbors and friends that lend me most of the equipment I need) can also be a worry.
And what about the future?
In the future I would like to increase my livestock numbers and find ways to increase productivity that suite my farm, whilst keeping costs at a reasonable level. I would like to earn a living without having to work off the holding and then hopefully one day buy some land.
My thoughts about our industry at present are positive and I hope that our farming Unions, Agricultural Ministers and Government can secure us fair trade deals and opportunities for growth in exports with the rest of the world, post Brexit.
I also think that we need to promote and sell more of our products to the home market, therefore having better food security and not relying so heavily on food imports.