Farming.

The crops are slowing growing now with some occasional warmer and (always!) longer days. Other than some cover crop seed areas all my main sowing is complete with all cereals in and up, this includes Planet barley after failed OSR. I’ll have no rape to cut this year which will be a first for a while. I travelled up to Scunthorpe yesterday and was heartened to see many fields of OSR in flower, some of that I’m sure destined for the silos at Woldgrain that I passed close by on the A15. Big grain stores are always so impressive. There were still many brown fields to be seen on my travels, these mostly were being planted with potatoes, sugar beet or maize.  Winter beans here are starting to extend in height thankfully and will start to flower soon and my wheat has had its first spray application (called T1). This comprised of two fungicides, a growth regulator and some trace elements. I have no idea what the fungicides were as the brand name gets changed every year with tweaks to the chemical mix percentages and depending on which distributer supplies them. I’m sure this is to confuse us simple farmers and discourage us from attempting to do our own agronomy and for me anyway it works!

Next jobs here include thinking about grain shed cleaning which means all the various part loads of remaining seed heaps need delivering to store or bagging into ton bags so I have some stock for next year. I have two farm walks planned for late May and early July which always requires the farm and barn to be clean and tidy, no bad thing. The combine has had its pre-service check-over and pleasingly again there is very little that needs attending to.  

My Basic Payment Scheme paperwork has been prepared for submitting to the RPA with the help of Brown & Co whom with advice from others will be helping to make a plan for my next Environmental Stewardship Scheme application as the current five year one comes to an end this year. Planning what I’m prepared to sign up to for the next five years and how it will integrate with other proposed new schemes, all with different start dates, is a nightmare. I’m sure this is to confuse us simple farmers and discourage us from attempting to claim too much money! The way I’m farming now should mean there are many simple wins (and financial rewards) but alas the red tape that sits behind the application and loss of freedom in how I manage what suits me and the “natural capital” areas of the farm year to year may mean the need for a simple life wins and I’ll be happier in my peasantry. 

Ingredients

Our ex Director and still dear friend of the business David Reynolds never missed the opportunity to remind us that we need to be in the business of providing ingredients. He of course was right and now with two consumers placed next door to two of our stores, and a long-term relationship with Nestle Cereal Partners we are providing just that. His other favourite topic is Pearled Barley, which we’re not onto just yet David! Anyway, on the subject of ingredients the purpose of my visit to Lincs yesterday was to meet the lovely people at McArthur Agriculture. These guys supply all sorts of farm and commercial grain store infrastructure (conflict of interest warning!) so storage, handling, drying, and more interestingly cleaning and processing machines, inc dehullers. I took three samples to put through their “grain lab”, one my heritage wheat to clean to a milling standard to mill in a local windmill to supple artisan bakers/farm shops. The second was to test drive the cleaner to clean weed seeds from a companion mix of 3 seed sizes ie winter peas, vetch and beans and finally to check sieve sizes required to split my Boats, so beans from oats. We succeeded on all three tasks but the icing on the cake was to then dehull the oats to produce groats from Boats! These were rolled in my “food standard”? farm workshop last evening to produce oat flakes for my porridge this morning. Home grown ingredients to make David R. proud and my production beat Navara by several months and a few fewer £s of investment 😀.