Month: April 2017

The good news is that the good spell of dry weather has continued allowing us to get most of the spring drilling done. As I write, we have about 14 hectares to do out of 137, so we should get finished this week.

The bad news is that the good spell of dry weather has continued, meaning that we have only had 120mm of rain here so far this year. Put that together with the total rainfall for October – December last year of 101mm, and things have been dry. Nature has a habit of balancing things out, so we are in for a prolonged wet spell at some time. The other take on this is that we have had quite a wet decade, so perhaps things have turned a corner, and we are in for a few dry years?

The fertiliser spreader has been in action this week, putting the final fertiliser on the winter barley, and the spring barley has also had its ammonium sulphate. This gives it some nitrate, as well as all the sulphur it needs for the season.

The new cultivator has also been in action, though it is beginning to show its sore points. It is really designed as a stubble cultivator, but we are using it also as a primary cultivator (that is cultivating ground that has been ploughed).

Because the ploughed ground is so hard we are losing bits off the tines, mainly the points. We will have to have a think over the summer as to what modifications we may need to make for this type of work.

With the price of agricultural machinery compared to the price of the produce we grow, using a contractor to do some of the work is a necessity. For example, we can’t justify the capital cost of a seed drill to do what we have to do, and besides, with the wide range of soil types we have at Cults Farm, finding a ‘one size fits all’ drill is not easy.
In our neck of the woods, there appears to be two types of contractor. The first is where someone has decided to set up a contracting business. The second is where a farmer has bought a large piece of kit – bigger than he probably needs – and then does some contracting with it to help spread the cost. Usually the second type is where a son has come home to the farm, and is quite happy to do this sort of work. The contractor we use is Iain Brown, who I’ve known since my days at Uni in Aberdeen. We have been using him to do all our drilling for over 20 years, and he has various types of drill, along with various sizes of tractor to pull them. When he comes in, he isn’t long in covering the ground.

So what are the drawbacks of using a contractor? Well, you have to be patient. Usually when your ground is fit to drill, so is the ground of most of his customers, so he can’t always come to you when you phone him up. Last weekend in the glorious sunshine we had to watch our neighbours drilling while we waited. To be perfectly honest, he couldn’t have done much here anyway, as not much was fit enough. Euan arrived on Monday afternoon and was here until Wednesday afternoon when the rain arrived. For a while on Wednesday we had 2 drills going, one 3m, and one 4m, so they hammered over the ground. Thursday was fair, but our ground was wet, so the 4m drill went away elsewhere where it was drier. It has rained on and off since then, so with a good forecast for this week, we are waiting patiently again.

The warmer weather has brought both winter and spring crops on quite quickly this week. We were spreading fertiliser on the winter barley – the first dose of nitrogen of the spring, and the first sown spring barley is just beginning to peep through the ground.