The View from the Hill

Saturday 12^th July 2025.  Harvest started this week, with the next generation in charge. They’ve romped through the winter barley, followed by a nibble at the OSR last night, and are pressing on with it today, in the boiling sun. Trying to catch it before moistures fall too low and seed is lost through shatter.

Some of our shiny 2 year old beefies, slowly basting in the sunshine, this was several weeks ago when fields were still green.  They have been gobbling up the grass on the meadows, which was barely keeping up with them as it has been so dry.  Thank goodness for the soaking we received at the end of the first week of June, which briefly prolonged the grass, but wasn’t in time to make much difference to the winter barley. A rather disappointing below average yield, having looked great throughout the season, not troubled much by disease as it has been so dry.  The wheat suddenly took a turn towards harvest about 10 days ago, and won’t be long before needing cutting, we rarely cut wheat in July here, but it looks like a dead cert this year. Again not too troubled by disease, but we fear for the drought effect. 

Farmers take to the water –

Our farmer cluster group at last achieved its long hoped-for aim, of paddling a stretch of the Stour, on a beautiful Monday evening in early June.  We put in at Bere Marsh farm, Shillingstone, where the Countryside Restoration Trust team had very kindly cut us a nettle-free path to the water.  Simon Jones, our intrepid leader for the evening, pushed the boat out so to speak, with Bryanston School where he is i/c canoeing, having obtained 6 Canadian style canoes, plus buoyancy aids, and laid out the plan for the next few hours.  After such a long period without rain, we didn’t really know what to expect at the waterline, would we actually get anywhere at all, was there a hope of reaching the boathouse back at Bryanston before dark?  Reeds, trees and weirs can conspire to frustrate the casual paddler, especially in such a year as this.  Sure enough, once we’d made it under Hayward’s Bridge, we were at once ensnared in reeds, which, for those not familiar with such things, was quite a struggle.  The first couple of kilometres were quite taxing, many reeds and seriously overhanging or fallen trees made the going pretty tough, at times a couple of us had to get out in the admittedly quite shallow water, to help the boats manoeuvre through, around, over or under a variety of obstructions.  And yes, we were quite nervous of swans too, we passed at least 6 at different points, luckily we managed to sneak past them all without any aggression being shown.  We only saw one cygnet, which seemed a little disappointing, and one swan was perched regally upon a beautiful island nest.

We had a few experts along with us, and the general feeling was that although shade is a good thing for a river, to encourage the shier aquatic creatures, perhaps one could have too much of a good thing.  Some trees were overhanging the water by at least 30 ft.
It is hard to overcome the strong impression that the Stour is little more than a series of near stagnant ponds, with a relatively small amount of current running over the weirs, and through the woody and weedy obstructions. It was ominous passing the various sewage plant outflows along the way, but fortunately no smell or even remotely coloured water there.  The river water seemed remarkably clean throughout the trip, something to do perhaps with the lack of rain, which in heavier downpours carries a lot of debris into the river, from roads, farmland and the river’s banks where they have been trampled by livestock, who should most definitely not be allowed to enter the river, haven’t you seen what comes out of the rear end of a cow, with absolutely no warning?  There is funding available for fencing to keep livestock out of rivers.

Open Farm Sunday – June 8th

A day spent as a tour guide on the farm tour trailers at Rawston Farm on Open Farm Sunday was as informative as it was exhausting.  The Cossins family threw open their farm gates to over 3000 visitors, and offered numerous rural and food attractions on a fresh sunny day, perfect in fact.

The team of drivers and guides with 4 tractors and trailers entertained over 1220 people between 10.30 and 4.30 pm, and we had to find answers for a good many questions from our guests, the ones about dairy farming being a particular challenge for this farmer, especially when it comes to trying to explain the notion of sexed semen.  How is it that all the calves in this field are Holstein Friesian heifers, and there are barely any bull calves? 

Sexed semen is a thing, it isn’t appropriate on our rather old fashioned farm, where we use reliable real bulls with our cows, rather than long rubber gloves and huge syringes.  High yielding dairy cows are nowadays artificially inseminated with semen that has been sorted for females, and it is around 90% successful.  Before this was possible, half of all calves born would be bull calves, which from the Holstein Friesian breed are not very good at producing meat, bred as they have been for optimal milk production over many generations.  This resulted in a supply of low quality beef entering the food chain, which provided poor rewards for the farmer, and disappointed consumers.  When using sexed semen on the best cows, enough herd replacement heifers can be planned for from the best cows, and then the rest can be inseminated from beef breeds, therefore producing a much better shaped animal for meat production.  It sounds like a win all round, with no serious downside other than the presumed extra cost, which should be recoupable later.

How is sexed semen processed? When processing semen, the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ chromosomes are separated by determining their size or DNA content. A laser is used to reduce the percentage of ‘Y’ chromosomes present in the batch of semen. It is possible that some male chromosomes will remain, but the chances will be much slimmer after being processed.  Information from Genus.

Back to the old-fashioned farm –

This picture from last year is one of our herbal ley fields, being enjoyed by one of the groups of cows and calves, also Theo the bull, head down mid picture.  The reason for showing this again is to help explain how difficult it is to marry the soil improving value of 3 or 4 years of grazed herbal ley, to the successful practical return of the field to the arable rotation.

The mixture of multiple species of grass, legumes and other species in the herbal ley provides a healthy diet for the cows, a vital disease and weed break for the arable crops, a fertility boost from the grazing and manuring of the cows, as well as the fixing of free nitrogen by the legumes, which are all pluses.  The difficult bit comes when terminating the ley so that a cash crop can be sown and grown.  Winter wheat would be the potentially best paying option, sown in the autumn, which we tried the last time we came to the end of a ley, but the wheat crop was hammered by leatherjackets (the larva of the crane fly, or daddy longlegs).  This pest loves to lay its eggs in grass fields.  The larvae hatch in early spring, and munch away on the grass below the surface, barely noticed because the well-established grass is growing quite fast.  When this happens in wheat you get large bare patches, which are annoying, and embarrassing especially when your farming neighbours can see them.

Some of those neighbours might suggest that was bound to happen because we insist on direct drilling our crops, but it’s the modern way isn’t it?  Less disturbance of the soil is high up the list of regenerative farming preferences, there’s less damage to soil structure, less oxidation of organic matter, less leaching of nitrate into water etc etc.  One thing cultivation of the soil, dare I say it, even ploughing, can bring however, is to expose those pesky leatherjackets to the air, where they can be feasted on by our feathered friends, especially seagulls, who can smell freshly turned soil from miles away.  They will also take worms though, which is definitely a bad thing, and one of the many reasons why we abandoned the plough more than 20 years ago.

We conducted an extensive debate in the farm office early in the spring, to decide how best to transfer Lower Down field back to arable:

Decision 1: Spring or autumn sowing?

Decision 2: Which crop?

Decision 3: How to sow?

There are many options, too tedious to list here, so I will cut to the chase.  The answer to No 1 was spring, this gives us the chance to leave the cows outside longer in the autumn, without the usual worry about damaging the pasture during wet weather, seeing as we were going to destroy it anyway.

Number 2 was trickier, a spring sown wheat or barley crop would risk squandering some of the break effect, but would not have the potential of an autumn sown crop, however any cereal crop would be at risk from leatherjackets, even if sown in the spring.  A non-cereal might be better, peas are no good here as it’s too stony, linseed is generally a loser, spring rape even worse.  This leaves us with beans, but they were awful last time we grew them in this field. Ok, how about oats, maybe mixed with a few beans?  That worked quite well last year, and if we grow it under the rules of the new SFI payment for low input cereal crops it might even make a profit.  Better make sure we apply for the payment in good time. *see previous broadcast about SFI car crash.

Here are the rules for AHW10: Low input harvested cereal crop:

Duration: 3 years

How much you’ll be paid: £354 per hectare (ha) per year (generous we thought)

Action’s aim: This action’s aim is that there’s a low input, open-structured cereal crop growing: • in strips or plots • during the spring and summer months until it’s harvested

The purpose of this is to: • enable wildflower species to grow within the crop • provide summer foraging sites for declining and localised farmland birds, such as yellowhammer and reed bunting • provide habitat for skylarks, farmland wildlife and pollinator species

(NB we sowed the crop, but the scheme closed a few days later, BEFORE we had pressed GO on the application form. Many farmers have been caught out by this non-sensical demolition of farmer confidence in “schemes”)

That just left us with a decision to make on how to establish the oats/beans bicrop.  To sow two crops together we need to use the Sky drill.  But hold on, the oats are a cereal, won’t they suffer from leatherjacket damage like the wheat did last time?  Shouldn’t we at least consider some cultivation? The problem here would be that the birds will turn over the lumps of turf as soon as sowing and rolling is done, leaving an open seedbed, vulnerable to drying out, and exposing seeds. Is this where the plough might have a place, it would bury the turf completely…?

The seed mix was sown direct into the remains of the herbal ley after spraying off with glyphosate, and allowing it to die off and go brown.  This way the drill should be able to cut though the dead turf and put the seeds in the right place.

In the event, the dry season has not been kind to the beans, the oats have done well, but have struggled with competition from some of the herbal elements of the ley, which did not respond well to the glyphosate. Being a bicrop, our options for in-crop weed control were limited. Watch this space for how we do it next time a ley has to come up. Congratulations if you not a farmer and have managed to get this far !

For my own benefit, here is a picture of our plough, last seen at work back in 2001, because it is quite possible we may have to try to find it before we need to terminate the next ley ground, or even to rescue Lower Down before sowing time in the autumn.

A moth interlude –

To a grain meeting –

Richard Wright, head grain trader from Bartholomews Agri Foods based in Sussex, treated around 30 local farmers to breakfast at the Hall and Woodhouse brewery, to bring us up to date with grain markets, sadly he didn’t bring a great deal of good news, although having stoked us up with the full english, we couldn’t blame him. This graph shows how for the last 25 years, grain consumption has matched production. This may seem obvious, clearly consumption cannot go beyond production, however one should note that in spite of a strong growth trend for production, consumption nearly always rises to meet it. And yet – prices in Europe and most of the world languish at the lower end of recent spreads, frankly at levels that do not offer a profitable outcome for farmers, especially relevant now that our own government has violently cut off the tapered winding down of the Basic Payment Scheme, which for decades has compensated farmers for low grain prices. Removal of the SFI is something of a double whammy, as I have said here before, so the lost likely outcome is a reduction in environmental commitments by farmers. Pretty disastrous.

And finally –

A packed sale room on Straw sale day saw prices rise to near record levels. Over 8000 acres of straw from across neighbouring counties went under Greg Ridout’s hammer in a couple of hours, as buyers sought to secure supply in a season suspected to be significantly lower yielding than usual. A buoyant milk price and a lively livestock trade may have helped out the cereal growers on this occasion.

Dorset Council are funding the development of an AI assisted robot to address ragwort control, here is Tim using a 360 degree camera to collect images to train the robot with.

Very pleased to catch three species of butterfly in one shot. This margin, and many others, heaving with butterflies in this bright, dry (but too hot) weather. They seem to particularly love the Scabious.

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