I cannot remember when I last wrote a piece for Farm Gate but I suspect we were wrapping up harvest and starting to drill next year’s crops. I was quite possibly full of optimism for next year too. Looking around most of the farm now saps my optimism! The awfully wet last 2 weeks of October and most of November has hugely impacted on the autumn drilled crops. Headlands of most fields have varying degrees of crop loss from little to total write offs and anywhere drainage is lacking or needs repairing tells a similar story. Fortunately, we did drill a large area of winter barley relatively early which has escaped most of the issues from wet weather and the odd fields of early drilled winter wheat are also looking remarkably well.

After a two-year break from milling wheat, we have decided to grow some Group 1 Crusoe again; Crusoe is perhaps not the highest yielding variety and does lack some disease resistance that other varieties have, however, Crusoe always delivered a quality product when we used to grow it and we managed this with lower total quantities of nitrogen fertiliser than we have used on Skyfall and KWS Zyatt. All of this Crusoe will be coming to the store straight from the combine, obviously at 13% protein with zero ergot!

Harvest still continues at RH Maddever Farms with 105 ha of sugar beet remaining to harvest. We are really pushing the limits growing beet on our land type, in a dry year we can do very well with the crop, in a wet year however harvesting can be delayed as the harvester cannot travel across the fields. We tried harvesting a field yesterday, within 30 minutes of starting the trailer was stuck, unfortunately we have abandoned harvesting for another few days. The upside of sugar beet is the current price of £40/t, with yields approaching 100t/ ha the margin from beet makes all other crops look rather poor.
 

I try not to use the Christmas word too early but as this will be my last piece before the big event, I will wish you all and very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Thank you all for your huge efforts throughout the year, I can assure you that this is appreciated by everyone.