This autumn is certainly a huge relief after the difficulties of last year. We have started drilling 2^nd wheats, which is pretty much as it should be. As we were hoping, conditions have allowed us to plough a bit more than usual this year, particularly where we have not had brome or black grass, but also just to keep some cultivations going and turn the ground.

We have also been able to delay drilling in some places to allow 2^nd and sometimes even 3^rd flushes of black grass before we have gone in to disc a couple of times and Roundup before drilling, to get on top of the black grass. The maize is all harvested and produced a good crop of silage, thanks to the sunshine we have had. We have drilled behind that with Crusoe and also some farmer trial plots for KWS.  The OSR is all in and up and is looking well. We were caught out by slugs on one small patch, which was irritating. They have caused considerable damage but there will doubtless be some crop recovery even there and it is certainly a different world from last year.

So far we have managed to roll everything after drilling and are up together with our pre-emergence sprays so it all seems almost too good to be true! However, being a farmer I can’t allow myself to be too optimistic and the slight cloud on the horizon is that we have had no significant rain for some time. We haven’t had enough to activate the pre-emergent herbicides so we could have some issues there if the rain doesn’t come soon.

On the sales side, all the Santiago and Crusoe and most of the Gallant have gone for seed but no Kielder has moved at all. I find this very surprising as this was our best yielding variety. I grow under contract so it won’t be a problem for me but I imagine it is getting quite late now for this to be picked up for drilling. We are still holding on to the rape as prices do seem to be creeping up at present so we shall wait for the price to be right or perhaps until cash flow dictates that we should sell.

We have just had our suckler cows PD’d and out of 45 animals we have had six not in calf, two of which were after twins and one a heifer that was probably too shy for the bull, but a bit disappointing with the other three. We did send off some beef animals for slaughter recently and they did well.

Cereal prices generally being down will take the gilt off the gingerbread for many and we could of course do with more, but I don’t think they are seriously low enough to cause major problems for those of us who had a reasonable harvest. Who knows what prices will do next year? – they could stay low I suppose but it only needs one bad harvest somewhere in the world and it might all kick off again.