It’s fair to say we have had a busy couple of months since the last column. The biggest achievement being I now have a wife.
Harriet and I got married on July 14 on the farm, it was a bit of a relief to most of the guests that we didn’t use a pig shed as the venue.
What a day it was, from start to finish, it was the best day and reminded both Harriet and myself how many good people we have around us. Even if one of my best men forgot the rings.
Our wedding was typically farmer themed, with a pallet bar and stage, straw bales and vegetable fleece to line the shed. I feel it suited us down to the ground and we wouldn’t have had it any other way. The best part about it being on the farm was the gravel, painting and improvements will last for years to come, plus our venue will always be called “The Wedding Shed” now.
We have cut our first 200 acres on the farm, all the winter barley is in the shed. Unfortunately, this year I am bragging about how many acres I cut a day rather than the yield.
Our yield across the farm was 7.7 ton/ha or 3.1 ton/acre which is well below our average. Losing tillers on plants through the cold wet spring and a distinct lack of sunlight during grain fill have been the main issues.
The unsettled July has also meant a lot of the grains have landed on the ground before the combine could make it to the field, there’s nothing more frustrating than driving over the field looking at heads of barley left behind.
Always one to find the silver lining, the earlier harvest of winter barley meant we got a day along at Turriff show, it was great to catch up with lots of people that I tend to only speak to over the phone and see how well the show was supported. The only tent I wasn’t allowed to visit was the beer tent, is this what married life is like?
All our grain goes to the pig enterprise to make feed, due to this we feel a poor harvest twice. Grains that have not filled means the quality is poorer and we will need to blend with better quality barley or change rations to compensate.
Our big aim for the coming cropping year is to start correcting our pH’s in fields after a couple of years holiday due to big investments and a very difficult year on the pig side. Investing in lime for us is a no brainer to get the most out of our arable crops, improve our nitrogen efficiency and get the farm into a rotation of sampling and liming.
We are revving ourselves up to start spreading slurry and preparing fields for establishing oilseed rape. This crop tends to see its birthday, with 2024’s crop likely to be sown before 2023’s oilseed rape has been harvested.
Like all true farmers the main field to get right is the one outside the bedroom window, which is destined for oilseed rape this year. If I mess this up I will wake up each morning in a bad mood, so for the sake of everyone that sees me day to day, a lot is riding on the next couple of weeks. They may say I am always grumpy tho?
To get it right I will be focusing on seed placement, I want all my plants to emerge uniform at similar time. I tend to try and sow earlier and can pull the seed rate back if the seed bed is looking good. Luckily the seed drill operator likes a challenge as he may be asked to sow the crop at as little as 2 kg per hectare, that really does take some precise calibrations and monitoring.
We have been rebuilding a shed that was damaged in the winter storms 2 years ago within the pig farm. This has been one of the big projects we’ve been waiting to tackle, with the concrete trucks about to arrive the pressure is on to get it right. These projects always seem to stretch when the day to day running of the farm, break downs, holidays and weather get involved.
I love this time of year as the excitement of harvest takes over the farm and everyone in the team steps up and gets involved in their own way. Long sunny nights are hopefully ahead of us with the smell of freshy combine fields. Here’s to a busy few months, some smiles and waves as we pass the neighbours and hopefully some good results at the end of it all.
