Harvest seems a distant memory, as the
grain store fan are blowing the cool air through the harvest grain and the
Cross Slot drill is wrapping the last few fields of autumn planted winter
wheat. It has not been our biggest harvest ever,
although I think we were spoilt last year with some great yielding crops but it
was far from a disaster either. Our
oilseed rape and winter barley were the worst performing crops down about 20%
from last year and slightly below our longer 5 year average. The oilseed and barley grains were small
which gave us problems of different sorts.
The barley size meant that we had high screenings, that means that too
many fell through a sieve resulting in less usable quality. The majority of the crop was sold and moved
at harvest to Molson Coors. The oilseed
rape has lower oils that last year; about 44% rather than 48% which gives us a
slightly lower grain price and the seed sizes were very small. This meant that the losses from the combine,
those seeds that carried straight through in the straw were a bit higher than normal
although fairly insignificant in terms of yield loss and on the bright side added to the cover mix.
The peas where slightly up on last year and have
some fantastic colour so will make a good price in a difficult market. The wheat we harvested was very variable with
some every good yields, in excess of 10t/ha and also some wheat from the hill
that were slightly disappointing yielding about 8t/ha. All of the quality has been excellent and
with very little drying costs due to the lovely warm sunny weather.
Harvest can be a long drawn out season but
thankfully this year; with near perfect weather, it was over in time for a bank
holiday weekend off for everyone, the last one was in 2003! Thanks to all the hard work and effort put in
by the whole team and also for the patience to those in the village often held
up with tractors and trailers rolling through the village.
