The rain has arrived just in time here, and the interspersing of showers and sun is making everything shoot up. It’s also given us some great rainbows, as you can see!

The crops are looking great at present. It feels dangerous to put such words in writing! And it feels highly unusual to have happy looking crops and healthy prices at the same time. As you know, farmers always like to have something to moan about, so this is providing a challenge to the industry at present, but one which we’ll take! Hopefully a bountiful harvest will provide a similarly pleasant challenge for Camgrain.

Previously we wrote about our white clover understory. This has been maintained under our crops to help improve soil and plant health and we are still trialling it to better understand the provision of nitrogen provided by the white clover. We have adjacent fields to the trial plots (same cropping type, same soils, drilled at the same time etc) with the only difference being that white clover was established in May 2019, and the neighbouring fields did not have any white clover sown. The difference was an addition of 17kg/ha per ha in the field with the white clover, which was tested by means of deep N core samples from 0 to 90 cm.

We have just submitted our application to go into a Higher Tier Countryside Stewardship Scheme with Natural England. This will enable us to put even more unproductive bits of the farm into nature-friendly options than we already do, and also enable us to get into livestock. We’ll be using hardy traditional native breeds that can be left out all year just living off the grass. We haven’t farmed livestock in hand since my grandpa’s day and it’s an exciting venture to be going back to using the same breed of cattle that he won prizes for. We know it won’t make a fortune, but it’s an important part of making the farm more sustainable.

Wishing you a pleasant rest of spring before the harvest madness starts.

Stay safe and well

Johnny