Autumn Antics

With harvest firmly wrapped up with the worst results known on this farm, thoughts turned to cultivations... ‘Should we, or shouldn’t we?’. ‘Let some rain soften it up or shall we help it along’. In true farmer style, we opted for the crack on approach while we had a window of opportunity. Cultivations started with the Fendt 828 and a sumo trio pulling up hard lumps. David then spent his time swapping between the Sumo trio and a Simba cultipress to press down what moisture we had. In hindsight and reflection this crack on approach is one of the better decisions of the year. More on this later.

We like many others have put areas of arable land into SFI, completely against my philosophy of grass on this farm and we have ended up with more than I would have liked. To shake up the rotation I decided to pop some oilseed rape back into the rotation and reduce the grass acreage. Last time we tried it, there was a plague of flea beetle leaving our commercial grain store (we store a large quantity OSR for United Oilseeds). The field got munched from the grain store to the headland. However this time around we have planted a little further away from the stores, and as we all know farmers are generally optimists and compulsive gamblers! (Who else would gamble money 12 to 18 months prior to the casino potentially paying out…?!). So with the ground cultivated and some horrid looking lumps we waited and waited for rain. Once it started it really did come and left us thinking that this time hindsight has paid off.

For us it was a case of picking a window which came on the 31^st August 2025 to plant a hybrid Oilseed Rape – Avenger, an ‘incredibly vigorous variety in the Autumn and Spring’, so we are keeping everything crossed.  Fast forward to a week on and some 50mm of rain, 25% of the acreage has been rolled but it’s all starting to germinate. Fingers crossed I won’t be dealt a bad hand this year on my casino gamble of oilseed rape!

My head now turns to wheat; Farming on heavy clay is always a gamble on when to plant winter wheat. Previous years have shown that crops planted in September really struggle with black grass, whereas crop planted in October have shown less in. This does mean we have to sit tight until October for our winter planting and hope we don’t get constant rain.  Fingers crossed for a more textbook season.

On a final note I was talking to someone in the aviation industry recently and it seems they have similar views to their industry as we have with farming. He said ‘to make a small fortune from aviation is simple, start with a large fortune’. That is so true to our industry too.

Autumn Antics

Written by Derek Pearce

Published by FTA.