We are now in one of the two best times of the year. One being completing harvest and the other planting next year’s crop and seeing the new seasons crop emerging well. We started drilling on 15^th September planting Craft winter barley into extremely high levels of trash with one of our direct drills. There is large volumes of straw this year so where we haven’t removed it through baling, we had to drill early because as soon as it gets wet it is nearly impossible to drill in to. Thankfully we do not have much of this scenario. Another thing to watch out for in these situations is high levels of slugs, which can decimate a crop overnight. Again, the early drilling allows these crops to get away from the slugs quickly meaning less use of slug pellets. 

As of now, the beginning of October, we have about a third of our autumn drilling campaign left to go; this is to let more blackgrass grow before planting. We must take a pragmatic approach to drilling dates. In an ideal world everything would be drilled on the 12^th October, the reality is this rarely happens; 2019 is an example where trying to drill everything late caused vast amounts of crops not to be sown and huge amounts of money lost. In terms of Aphids, another threat in the autumn, which can also be a problem with early drilling, our local trap has caught eight Aphids so far! They can transmit a virus called Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus. It is important to regularly check crops for these bugs and spray an insecticide, if needed. We have not done this for many years, but never say never!