Over the Farm Gate is kindly supplied by John Jefferies - Farmer Director

The winter barley and winter wheat crops were good but the beans and spring barley were disappointing. I think the reason for this was the swing between various extremes of weather that we now seem to have. I can’t remember a recent growing season when we have had the mixed bag of English weather that was normally connected to our climate. As a farmer, I feel our industry is at the coal face of climate change - although the use of ‘coal face’ in that analogy seems perverse.

I have a number of AB9 wild bird food strips on the farm and these have thrived over the summer in the warmth (yes it has been warm) and the moisture from the damp weather. The amount of growth and flower of these crops has been astonishing. When I looked at them earlier this week they were brim top full of pollinating insects. There were many species of bees; some very small, some larger, Hover flies and bumble bees too. The food supply that these areas provide are already hugely benefiting the local environment. 



Seeing these pollinating insects working hard also takes me back to the reason why the beans on the farm were so poor. They yielded 50% of expectation and the reason for that was they flowered during that horrible cold spell at the end of May and early June; a period that lasted almost two weeks. It was so cold and windy that the bees simply decided to stay home and not to venture out to forage in the crop. A stark reminder of how important pollinating insects are to our food supply. This poor pollination period was then followed by about a week of fair weather before the temperature soared to 30°C. The high temperature dried up the remaining bean flowers. The beans only had a week or so of good weather during flowering. This also serves to illustrate the potential consequences of climate change on farming.

But the prime reason for these AB9 areas of cropping is to provide a food source for small birds during the course of the winter. In past years we have observed up to 3000 linnets, 300 yellow hammers, 300 chaffinch and about 100 corn bunting on this farm. A friend who is a department director at the RSPB and a keen birder said to me ‘you have the entire Corning bunting population for 25 miles around on this farm’. But for me, having 300 yellow hammers, which are one of my favourite birds, over-wintering on the farm is astonishing. Yellow hammers are on the RSPB red list. The numbers above are pre-bird flu. Let’s hope the survivors can find their way back here for this coming winter.

The next month or so will see the planting of the crops for harvest 2024. Some have already been done. I have a couple of fields of Oil Seed Rape that are fighting off an onslaught of slugs during the wetter weather and an equally vivacious onslaught of cabbage stem flea beetle in the hot sunny weather. The next month or so will show if we have a crop here or the expense and trouble of planting something else. The crop below seems to have cleared these two hurdles but will still need quite a lot of management to get it to harvest. The rapeseed is the dark blueish/green leaf and everything else is either a companion crop, a barley volunteer or blackgrass.