"MAKE hay while the sun shines" is a popular saying, although there has not been a great deal of sunshine and it is certainly not the hay-making season, land operations have continued to gather pace.

Unfortunately some more rain has arrived to remind us that it is not usually far away. It has been a rather chilly week, but dry, cold conditions have meant that most of the Stowell Farm ewes have been turned out in the parks with their newborn lambs.

Lambing on Stowell Farm has gone well this year. Since the beginning of March 1, 600 ewes have given birth, with only about 200 left to lamb. It has been a very busy time with lots of extra people employed to help, including a night-lamber.

The ewes are housed in barns and have been grouped according to the number of lambs they are carrying. This is so that they can be fed higher levels of nutrients if the are carrying twins or multiples. After each ewe has given birth she is put in an individual pen with her newborn lamb(s) to make sure they are feeding properly, that their mother has a healthy udder and has plenty of milk. It is also the time that triplet or lambs from other multiple births are put with a foster mother if one is available, as each ewe can only suckle a maximum of two lambs.

Any lambs without a mum join a creche of lambs which are bottle fed, to date there are 50 of these. Melissa is looking after these lambs and is responsible for feeding them three times a day on specially formulated milk powder, which is mixed with warm water prior to feeding. Once the ewes are settled with their lambs they have been transported to fields, where the fresh grass should help the ewes produce plenty of milk for the growing lambs. The weather deteriorated over the Easter weekend, but the lambs should now be strong enough to cope.

Another job that has to be done during lambing is ear tagging. It is Melissa's task and to make sure all the information is correctly recorded using an electronic scanner. All the newborn ewe lambs have an ear tag put on both their ears, one of which is an EID tag (electronic identification tag). The ewe lambs will all be used for breeding and will be kept as breeding replacements or sold on to other farmers. The wethers (castrated ram lambs) will not have to be electronically tagged until they leave the farm to go to an abattoir, are sold as stores or become over one year old.

Here on Manor Farm all the manure has been spread on the over-wintered stubble and Ian has finished spreading the first dressing of nitrogen fertiliser on all the crops. This has been done using our new second-hand fertiliser spreader, which was set up and calibrated by a trained engineer before use.

This machine, like the sprayer, can spread the fertiliser over a 20-metre width as the tram lines are now set at this new distance in all our autumn planted cereal crops.

The fertiliser spread was urea, an organic compound which is the main nitrogen-containing substance found in the urine of all mammals. It is colourless, odourless and virtually non-toxic when dissolved in water.

It is a widely used fertiliser and has the highest nitrogen content of all solid nitrogenous fertilisers, containing 46 per cent nitrogen. Urea rapidly dissolves in a small amount of water and is rapidly broken down by bacteria into ammonium salts, readily absorbed by plants. It does, however, have one drawback, being unstable in sunlight, so it is only used early in the growing season because of its volatility.

At the start of the week we decided that we could turn the 18-month-old heifers and the bull out into a field next to the barn, as the weather was fine and there was a nibble of grass. Unfortunately the forecast soon changed, with storms heading our way across the Atlantic and the grass not growing. They are now back in their winter accommodation.