If you are interested in seeing what the weather is like at Cults Farm at the moment, then you can see here.
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This was the front page headline on a popular farming magazine in the summer of last year. The main article was all about how the weather would be the deciding factor in world grain markets over the coming year, but on a more local scale the weather influences farming hugely. When I was a student and doing my farm practical, the farms manager said to me that all us farmers do is fine tuning. It’s the weather that makes or breaks a harvest year.So it is no surprise to find that whenever a bunch of farmers get together one topic that always gets discussed is the weather. “Weather’s a’ tae pot again, it’s been a wet spring this year”, “Aye, an’ we don’t get the frosts like we used to!” Like most things, it is amazing how your memory can play tricks on you as to what the weather was actually like a few years ago.
With this in mind, I took the decision to install a weather station on the farm in late 2012. This allows me to record rainfall, temperatures, humidity and wind speed and direction. Rainfall is the most closely followed as that is usually the biggest influence on whether you can do any field work or not. So what things has it told me this year?We’ve had a very dry spring. April recorded only 4.2mm of rain. Looking back over the past 7 months, we’ve only had 220mm of rain in total. The average yearly rainfall for this area is around 650 – 700mm, so we have a bit of catching up to do. It has also been a cool spring. In many ways this has been a good thing, as crops have been slow to grow, so haven’t had a high demand for water (yet). The result of this is that generally speaking, things are looking well for the time of year, with the exception of one field of spring barley which won’t germinate until it gets a good soaking.
The (fairly) honest diary of a Scottish Arable Farmer