The View from the Hill
It seems long ago that we started harvest, way back in mid July, it has turned out to be one of those long drawn out affairs, very much stop start due to very variable weather, it takes the tiniest amount of moisture to stop operations, and several hours of breeze and sunshine before we can get going again. As the season wears on, the days get shorter and the nights get damper, our resistance levels to cutting wet grain have to go lower, and we resign ourselves to longer periods spent drying, and higher fuel bills. On most farms there is a direct relationship between combining capacity, drying capacity, and what time of day you can start cutting. The bigger your combine and the smaller your drier, the later in the day you start cutting. This is where we fit in, once the combine is running, it can produce a lot of grain in a short time, up to 40 tons per hour in a heavy wheat crop, whereas the drier is only rated at 11 tons per hour, so very quickly it is overwhelmed if the grain is too moist. In the middle of a good weather day it is remarkable how quickly grain moisture drops in the field, even an hour can see it drop by 2 percent, which can make the difference between a midnight finish and an all-nighter, in the drier house.
Right now (this bit was written on the bank holiday weekend) we are in yet another rain break, having had 30mm of rain on Saturday, and another 5 mm on Saturday and Sunday nights. We have cut all the main crops, with a day’s work left on Wildfarmed bicrops that are ready, and a bit more that is not yet ripe, as with the spring beans, and the remaining cover crop seed plots.
Harvest actually started with cutting the plot of turnips destined for sowing again this year as seed in our cover crop mixes, swiftly followed by the crimson clover plot for the same purpose, and then the phacelia. Having all been autumn sown, they ripened a good deal earlier than if they’d been sown in the spring, like the buckwheat, vetch and camelina need to be, as they rarely survive the cold of winter.
These pictures show the changes in the seed plots from last autumn, through phacelia and crimson clover flowering in May, to mid July, when we cut the turnips and clover.
It was only then that we could get into harvest proper, with the oilseed rape fit to cut before the winter barley, for the first time ever.
But before any of this we had the small matter of owls in the combine spout to deal with. Those who managed to read my last episode, too long ago I know, in May, may recall that an owl had been spotted entering and leaving the unloading tube of the combine parked up in the tractor shed. Advice taken led us to believe it was likely to be a solitary male, but as so often is the case, things turned out rather differently.
Several weeks later, just as we had forgotten all about it, due to the days getting longer and the yard being quiet at dusk and overnight, some odd noises were heard from the combine. More advice was taken, and this time the conclusion was that perhaps there were chicks in the auger tube. This was mad, what crazy bird would lay eggs down a cold metal tube filled with a twisty metal auger? It was a bit of a problem, no one wants to disturb young chicks, but harvest was rapidly approaching, and we needed to run up the combine to check all was working, but we couldn’t risk mangling up any chicks. So we decided to manually turn the auger and see if we could persuade anyone in there to come out. By the number of turns on the pulley that drives the auger, we estimated that the nest must have been at least a metre down the tube, but sure enough, gradually coming into view were the pale brown feathers of a young barn owl, who we managed to catch, and move into the owl box recently installed in the tractor shed. Was there going to be another we wondered? So we turned the auger a few more times, and hey presto, out comes chick number two. When I say chick, I really mean beautiful, fully feathered young adult barn owl, who must have been on the cusp of fledging. Seeing as they had never seen daylight, they coped remarkably well. How they would have found their way out of the auger tube a metre or more from the open end, without our assistance, is a good question, and if we had not heard them, and had thrown the auger into gear a few days later, they would have been history. Fortunately we managed to get them both into the owl box, but by the morning they had managed to jump/fly out and were perching on the wall bars of the shed. After a day or two hanging around and doing some flying practise, they disappeared, but have been seen locally on numerous occasions. We think that their parents had kept them fed throughout, and will have taken them out for hunting lessons.
Returning to the cover crop theme, we have ramped up our seed mixing system a good deal this year. We have purchased a selection of tote bins, that each hold up to 1.5 tons of grain or seeds, and a brand new pan mixer (usually intended for mixing concrete). These additions have revolutionised the set up. Formerly we were hand blending purchased bags of seeds into a feed barrow, then bagging up 20kg at a time, a bit tedious after the first 20 bags. Now we are mixing 600kg at a time, using mainly home grown seeds which have been combined, dried if required, in a tote bin, then weighed directly into the mixer. The mixer sits on a pair of weigh bars, which are another essential ingredient for this new system. Once mixed, the blend, often up to 6 different species in one blend, can be decanted directly into the drill, or else into another tote bin, for later drill filling. It’s bloomin’ marvellous.
To achieve our 10 species mix overall, we create two different mixes, which can be sown at the same time, at different rates and depths by the Sky drill. Firstly a small seeds mix, comprising turnip, 2 clovers, camelina, phacelia and linseed, and secondly a large seeds mix of buckwheat, vetch, daikon radish, and peas or beans depending on whether they are to be the next cash crop in the spring. Many of these are now home grown, as can be seen in the pictures above, giving us control of the supply chain, for both prompt delivery and weed control purposes.
If we decide the seedbed will benefit from some cultivation, we can sow a simple small seeds mix through the seeder mounted on our set of discs, which again can be filled quickly and easily.
As soon as the straw was cleared from harvested fields destined for spring crops, Doug filled up the drill and headed out to sow all these seeds, it was a pretty full on job mixing seed and keeping him topped up, at the same time as managing the grainstore with Brendan and Gary pulling in loads of wheat every half hour. It was just as well that Fred kept the pressure up with the combine though, because rain soon interrupted that lovely early flow of dry grain, most of the rest since then has had to be dried.
In between the rain showers and days of harvesting, we have had great fun enjoying visits by various friends from across the world, some of whom who were happy to demonstrate the height of our fennel/teasel etc bird food plot.
You may think I am a little obsessed with cover crop seeds and grainstore activity, but that is the nature of harvest for the old git left in the farmyard while everyone else swans around in supercooled hifi cabins, with the steering done by satnav. Once the seeds plots were cut, we had to first dry them, using a rather Heath-Robinson arrangement, and then run them over the old Rutherford cleaner. The picture here attempts to explain how this works, using a series of screens peppered with regular sized holes, huge sieves if you will, the lower set have an arrangement with a frame below which carries a set of brushes, which slowly weaves from side to side, keeping the screen clean, which would otherwise bung up with seeds, stones or trash jammed in the holes.
We also use this machine to separate the bicrops, first through was the spring oat/bean mix, which separated quite well, then we were able to run the oats through the drier on their own, which now sit in a heap awaiting sale. Next up was the field of spring barley with peas. Again the basic separation has gone well, but removal of the embarrassing level of cleaver seeds has been more of a challenge, even after drying, which I had hoped would shrivel them smaller and make them easier to remove, far too many remain. A cleaning charge will have to be faced, running over a gravity separator off farm may be the only way to clean them out. Modern farmers will be yelling at the screen right now, asking why on earth did we not use more weedkiller to solve the cleaver problem? We couldn’t do this because the contract we have with Wildfarmed for these odd combination crops stipulates no weedkiller or fungicide, and only limited amounts of artificial fertiliser. However early gross margin calculations are showing that these two particular combinations have performed significantly better than any solo spring bean or linseed crop, and compare favourably with our other crops apart from the first wheats. The winter wheat with beans blend however, was awful, riddled with disease and very short on yield, despite having looked strong for much of the season.
We have yet to finish separating the spring wheat/bean blend, so cannot yet declare a result. Lateness of sowing has definitely put the lid on yield hopes, but it will be better than the winter blend.
As I write, the millet is looking fantastic, how we will know when to cut it is however a bit of a challenge, the leaves are still very green, but the seeds are beginning to turn
Trade was brisk and prices positive at the straw sale we hosted in early July, with our friends from Symonds and Sampson. With a record turnout of over 130 buyers, sellers and viewers, 10,000 acres went under the hammer, and the vast majority found a home. After a long wet winter, straw stores are empty, and poor crops due to the same wet winter has led to fears of straw being short. Many livestock farmers, generally further west from here, still rely heavily on straw to bed and feed their animals over winter.
A great image snapped by one of our teacher guests last term. I always like to ask the children who they think is the more interested party on school visit days, themselves the brightly coloured and rather noisy inhabitants of the trailer, or the waggle-eared, damp-nosed, tail-swishing munchers of herbage in the field.
Three very greedy young pigs are with us for the summer, enjoying an entirely home grown diet for the first time. Our local mobile feed wagon called in to mill up some wheat, barley, peas and beans, to which I add 10% of protein-rich rape meal from which we have squeezed the oil, then mix into a yummy porridge, which they slurp down in seconds. They are certainly growing well on it, with a month to go they look like they will perform at least as well as when predecessors were fed on purchased weaner pellets, which no doubt contain imported soya from who knows where.
There’s always someone who insists on going the wrong way when we move the sheep between paddocks, luckily help was at hand from willing helpers who just happened to be passing.
Buckwheat has grown really well this year, it looks lovely, the best harvesting time is tricky to determine, being indeterminate, there will still be flowers when we cut it, but seeds at the bottom will start to fall out before flowering ends.
For those interested in the rewilding / nutrient neutrality / Poole harbour topic, which I have covered in these pages before, it will be no surprise that the news in July that Dorset Council was considering the purchase of a farm in order to ‘rewild’ it and hence generate nitrate credits, was going to be controversial. The problems of pollution in the Poole Harbour catchment have long been an issue in south Dorset, where farmers have been going through a painful process to firstly understand, and secondly to begin to moderate, the (theoretical) leaching of nitrate from their land. They have been obliged to complete the Nitrate Leaching Tool created by the Environment Agency, a now largely discredited spreadsheet tool, which attempts to calculate the nitrate output generated by different kinds of farming. The scheme is underpinned by a notional maximum leached quantity of N beyond which they will have to pay a penalty. Ultimately the idea is that farmers with spare N capacity will be able to trade it with farmers who wish to continue with a nitrogen heavy regime on their land. Confusion begins to set in when you add into the mix the water company, who seem to find it cheaper to buy these N units, than to install better sewage treatment facilities, (there is still dispute about who is responsible for how much of the pollution, water companies or farmers).
Now we see huge amounts of public money being spent on buying farmland (see my piece on Lyscombe farm and Dorset Wildlife Trust here), which will make no difference to the pollution in the harbour, but is somehow freeing up planning permission for thousands of new houses in the catchment, for which the developers and land owners have to pay £3250 per nitrate credit. The number of nitrate credits they must purchase is calculated by multiplying the average number of inhabitants of the planned new dwellings (2.42 for a house, 1.65 for a flat) by a standard amount of nitrate emission per person (3.5kg per year). This figure is then reduced to 25% due to 3/4 of the nitrate deemed to be removed by the water company’s treatment works. This calculation comes from Dorset Council’s 2017 Nitrogen Reduction in Poole Harbour Supplementary Planning Document.
The Council’s calculation shows that for the 3700 houses “released” by the purchase of Lyscombe farm, there will be 6.845 tons of nitrogen produced, which will need to be mitigated. What makes this more confusing is the wildly different calculation by Natural England in a recent letter where they claim the pollution caused by the 3700 new homes in the Poole catchment will only comprise 3.587 tons. Who does one believe, can we in fact believe either of them? You will detect a great deal of cynicism here, I have farming and landscape as a deep concern, and am not impressed by computer driven modelling used by the officers of national bodies to drive very expensive land purchases which do not begin to solve the actual problem. A great deal more difference could be made to Poole harbour if the money was spent in more imaginative fashion, EG:
- Use proper science to obtain accurate estimates of real time emissions from different types of farmland, using porous pots, run-off traps and other methods
- Where necessary persuade farmers, with financial support, that in some cases it may be time to alter some of their farming practises, eg move or close dairies and slurry stores positioned close to rivers.
- Devise targeted schemes to pay farmers to withdraw intensive, or even all farming, from specific areas, for example within 100 metres from any water bodies, or more controversially from drained land which can carry nutrients direct from the land into waterways.
Fortunately Dorset Council’s attempt to buy the farm in the article above has been cancelled, one can only hope that they can come up with better ideas for reducing the impacts on the environment of more building and more people, with this pot of money that they were given by the Department of levelling up Housing and Communities (DLUHC) (recently renamed the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government).
Next month
Always great to hear from the”old git” in the grain store! Love the story of your barn owls
This whole thing of Nitrate (and, indeed, Carbon) credits and trading of them is open to a great deal of scepticism by any right thinking person. There is a great deal of political posturing about the whole matter.
The unhappy truth is that politicians are unwilling to legislate to cut down the use of fossil fuels by ordinary voters – for instance there are between (depending on who you ask) 7,700 and 10,000 aeroplanes in the sky at any one time in the world. Surely they aren’t all essential?
One day politicians may find out that people need to eat rather more often than they need to take a ride in a plane or a car and that going for the ‘soft’ target of Agriculture in these Nitrate and Carbon excesses is not the way to win friends in the long term.
Impressive cover crop seed system going on there, over here in the east it seems that we can’t get such things to germinate successfully. Or at least I can’t and none of my neighbours bothers now either. I am abandoning my regenerative experiment on 10% of my land after 7 years as the average yield has been less than half of the 90% that has been conventionally farmed.
Well worth waiting for. Could home produced ‘margin’ seed mixes be expanded to an off farm export line thus enabling the justification of buying better seed processing kit?