With rain-soaked weeks, compost chaos and sweeping revelations, George Hosford has been navigating a turbulent autumn on the farm
It’s been quite the soggy autumn – we’ve recorded an eye-watering 208mm of rain in September, (average is 76mm), 155mm in October (average 120mm) and 141mm in November (average 120mm). Everything is utterly soaked.
We had so few dry days that autumn sowing progress was very limited. Doug eventually managed to sow the winter barley across three separate days – only to have it pour down again very shortly after. No hope of rolling, and thank goodness we decided not to apply any pre-emergence weedkillers this year, as they can be washed into the rooting zone of the seeds by heavy rain, risking crop damage.
Those farmers not afraid of sowing early may be feeling pleased they got a shift on – there was a week-long window of opportunity at the beginning of October. At Traveller’s Rest we try to hold back when the weather is mild like this year, as aphids carrying the barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) will still be flying and spreading it.
We prefer to collect the £45 per hectare Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) payment (bribe?) not to use insecticides to combat BYDV, so we have to take steps like sowing later, once the weather gets cooler (and inevitably wetter …).
The SFI for 2024 now offers payments for 102 (count ‘em!) different options designed to protect and benefit the environment, including the no-insecticide option.
It’s effectively a pick-and-mix approach so that farmers can tailor their own agreements. For anyone unfamiliar with this, and curious to know what ‘public money for public goods’ looks like – simply click here (warning: it’s quite dry!). Invitations to apply for these options were announced back in July, and thousands of farmers made applications.
On a knife edge
However, only hundreds have been offered agreements to date, due to manual checking while (we are told) the system beds down. DEFRA had made huge steps forward with SFI 23, many offers were made, accepted and put into action very efficiently. Some of the actions on the list we opt for include the growing of cover crops, growing companion crops (such as in our bi-crops of wheat with beans) and not using those insecticides.
We are now a long way into the new post-Brexit arrangements era of public money for public goods, although delivery has been painfully slow.
The old payments system (BPS) – which was based on area farmed – is now at half the value it used to be, and will be down to zero by 2027. However, the new systems have been running behind at approximately £100 million per year for the last three years.
If the government wants to secure the nation’s home-grown food supply, and to ensure that all the environmentally beneficial actions, that the SFI promotes, happen, then it will have to give clear and positive signals to farmers in order to keep their confidence, which is currently on a knife edge.
Ignoring the agricultural Inheritance Tax Relief furore, the recent budget allocated £5 billion for farming and the environment over the next two years – touted as the ‘largest amount ever dedicated to supporting sustainable food production and nature recovery’.
Most of the SFI list of environmental actions require land that would otherwise be used to produce food to be taken out of production. This can only happen if the rewards are sufficient, and if the recipients believe that the system isn’t going to lurch from one extreme to the other with every change of government. Cycles are very long in farming, and long-term planning is rare in politics.
If it’s not one thing …
As well as trying to sow barley and wheat between the numerous rain events, Gary tried to get all our compost spread – we had 4.5km of compost windrows around the farm waiting to be spread onto our growing cover crops.
On the day he should have finished, he was prevented from doing so by a large bearing failure on a shaft driving the feed chain in the bottom of the machine. No chance to fix it on the Friday it happened, and then yet more rain across the weekend. Returning to the machine on Monday morning, he had a puncture in the tractor…Sidenote: in my endless search for interesting pictures to accompany this column, I flew my drone last month, hoping to obtain action footage of Gary at work. Sad to report the drone developed a compass error, and with barely any warning flew off on a corkscrew path towards the Bonsley Forest. It came to rest (I am supposing) high in a beech tree – far too high and impossible to see until the leaves drop. Thus far, my pictures remain unreachable and unpublishable!
Sweeping insights
It has taken me many years to properly appreciate the attributes of a broom. During the course of a harvest, many acres of floor are swept, and the better the broom, the more enjoyable and satisfying the job is. The angle of the broom head, by which I mean the angle at which the bristles meet the ground, is crucial if you only want to sweep each part of the floor once: it will help greatly if the bristles are at right angles to the floor.
Second to this comes the angle of the handle – it has to be attached to the broom head at the right angle to allow the first requirement to be met, and it needs to be long enough to not have to bend over too much while sweeping.
This may all seem blindingly obvious, but it is surprising just how many brooms on the farm do not meet these basic specifications – and consequently do a pretty rubbish job.
To the first two characteristics above I would add two more. The quality of the bristle, and no, plastic just does not cut the mustard. Plastic bristles are invariably too stiff, so do not vibrate in the right way in order to keep the dust/grain/rubbish moving along in front. In general it seems that natural products like bassine are the best – bristles need to be stiff enough, but not too stiff. A general purpose broom will have to cope with a variety of surfaces, from lovely smooth power-floated or polished concrete to rough farmer-laid concrete from the 1970s, tarmac or wooden floors. No sane person wants to have to keep three different types of broom, so they have to be just right, as Goldilocks discovered in the house of the three bears.
The last, and potentially most irritating, detail is the small matter of how the handle is fixed to the head. Many heads are pre-drilled for the handle, which means there is a gap in the middle. This in turn then leaves a line of material in every swoosh, and who wants that?
Last summer I found the closest broom to perfection I have ever had the pleasure of working with – a 36 inch Bassine broom from the Bearing Boys in Norfolk, one of my favourite online suppliers for so many items, from belts to bearings, … and now brooms, obviously. They are light too, which adds even more pleasure to the job! So I’ve bought three more this year, and I love using them.
