Spring the Summer Long

Early Autumn Update

Autumn is usually a fairly quiet time on the farm. There are things going on, but after the madness of harvest we all stop to take a breath for a while. This year is no exception, and apart from a bit of winter barley being sown, things were quiet.

Carrot Lifting

We let out some ground each year to a neighbour for growing carrots. This helps us in many ways, but principally because it gives us another crop in our rotation. We have been finding that the crop of barley following carrots is generally better than one that follows a cereal crop.

One condition we have is that they are not to be strawed up. Carrots are covered in straw in the autumn to protect them from frost. This allows them to be lifted throughout the winter. The problem is getting rid of all the straw when they have been lifted. This is why we don’t want them strawed up, so they have to be lifted before frosts are likely.

The weather has been kind, and the ground is reasonably dry for lifting this year (so far at least). Yes, there is some mud trailed out onto the road, but not as bad as it can be. You can see from the photo at the top of the article that there is not much mud on the tractor wheels.

The photos this month show the harvester lifting the carrots into trailers, and also the shaw remover.

This machine takes the leaves etc off the carrots before the lifter comes along.

Autumn Drilling

I wrote last time that I didn’t think we would be putting any winter crops in this year because it was getting a bit late for drilling winter barley. In the end, we put in about 20 hectares, but it was not because we wanted to.

Like most occupations, farming is governed by complex and at times mind boggling regulations. The current iteration of the subsidy regime includes what is known as the 3 crop rule. Basically to qualify for subsidy you have to grow at least 3 crops, and no one crop can occupy more than 75% of your total arable area. Now, don’t get me wrong, the idea behind this is sound, in that it is there to stop subsidy going to big monoculture farms like you find in the Paris Basin, and down in South east England. Normally we would not be anywhere near falling foul of this regulation, but because of the poor late summer we were not able to get any oilseed rape in the ground, and were struggling for winter barley. Our other main crop is spring barley, which would have taken over 80% of our arable area. We had little choice but to put some winter barley in the ground.

We ended up drilling winter barley down the bottom of the hill, as that was where the ground was fittest, and because of the mild, dryish weather we have had since then it is looking quite good. We may therefore get away with it. It does mean that we have lost some good spring barley ground though.

RSABI Sober October

For those wondering how I am getting on in the challenge I set myself last time (here), I have successfully got to 29th October without touching any alcohol. At times it hasn’t been easy, but with 3 days to go I should just about manage now. I can see me having a glass of wine or 2 on Wednesday evening though!

RSABI – Supporting People in Scottish Agriculture

Farming has changed dramatically on many fronts since I came home to farm, but perhaps the biggest change is in the number of people that now work on farms. 40 years ago the farm had 5 employees working, as well as Dad and my grandfather. Now there is myself and Dad, and a couple of part time helpers at harvest time. Farming can now be a very very lonely job.

Given that you are at the mercy of so many things beyond your control, and are living ‘on the job’ 24/7, it can be very easy to become wrapped up in your own wee world. It is perhaps no surprise that farming has one of the higher occupational rates of suicide in the UK.

I am fortunate in that I have many interests outside farming, and also have another business fixing computers, which gets me away from the place for a while and means I meet other people. But even I have to admit that there were times this harvest where I just felt that the pressure was getting a bit much.

RSABI is a charity who’s roots go back to 1897, when agriculture was going through a tough time, and people were in desperate need of help. The Royal Scottish Agricultural Benevolent Institution was set up to help elderly, disabled, and distressed Scottish tenant farmers and their dependents, and has now become RSABI. You can read more about the charity by going here or the banner at the top of the article.

So why am I bringing them to your attention now? MacMillan Cancer Support are running a fund raiser called Sober October. Basically you get people to sponsor you to stay off the grog for all of October. Now, before people rush for the exit, I’m not about to ask anyone for sponsorship. In the first place, I want to do something to help RSABI, and secondly I would feel embarrassed at asking people to sponsor me for something like this.

I enjoy a beer or two, and a glass of wine or three at the weekend. Assuming the price of a good bottle of wine is around £10, and 3 or 4 good beers is another £10, that is £20 a weekend I spend. I am going to have a Sober October, and donate the £80 I save to RSABI at the end of the month. Now this WILL be a challenge. Just before my birthday I ‘replenished my cellar’ with some very nice wines that I have been enjoying the past few weekends. They will now sit and tempt me every Saturday night, and I’ll have to find an alternative to have with our chinese takeaway! 🙂 However, it is all in a good cause. Wish me luck, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Harvest 17 Update: All is Safely Gathered In!

It’s been a few weeks since I updated what we have been up to. It feels like a lifetime, but looking back from here, I wonder sometimes what all the fuss was about! Harvest finished on 19th September, which was just over 7 weeks from when we started, which is about bang on average. The last couple of weeks were a bit fraught though.

Breakdowns

I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I was nursing the combine through harvest as best I could. We’d just had a fan bearing go, and the hydraulic oil cooler was leaking, but I was keeping an eye on things. The fan bearing and associated shafts, cogs, etc were all successfully replaced, and I got back to harvesting almost exactly a week after breaking down. I was cutting perhaps the steepest field on the farm, so was taking my time, and just about had it finished. While turning on the side of a hill, the hydraulic oil warning light/buzzer came on, but just briefly. I didn’t have much to do until I’d finished the bit I was on, so carried on until I’d emptied into the trailer at the side of the field. I’d been having to top up the hydraulic oil level periodically because of the leak, so I thought that was all I would have to do. However when I got to the back ladder, there were spots of hydraulic oil on it, which got more as I went up to the engine compartment. The cooler leak had got worse, so I limped my way down to a level part of the field next the gate, and gave Stuart at Sellars a phone again. 5 minutes later the rain came on anyway, so I didn’t lose out on much.

We lost a day and a half until the cooler was repaired, during which it rained. I managed to finish the field on the Friday, but what a change in ground conditions. Things had been damp on the Wednesday, but now they were wet. Getting up the hill was a real challenge.

The other major breakdown we had was at the grain dryer. Our dryer is a continuous flow dryer, which means that it is a column, where wet grain goes in at the top, and by the time it gets to the bottom it is dry. Grain is moved in to and away from the dryer by a system of elevators and conveyors – the elevator moving the grain up, and the conveyors in a horizontal direction. The elevator works by having a series of buckets fixed to a rubber belt, the grain being transported up in a bucket, and then chucked out at the top. Our elevator is a double legged elevator which is quite old. It has been on the radar for being replaced for a number of years, but due to costs, and restrictions of the building the dryer is in, we’ve not done anything. Our hand will be forced over the winter. The belt in the leg that handles the wet grain snapped.

The picture shows the result. The leg on the right is what it should look like. The left leg was the one that took the wet grain from either the pit or the wet bin, and put it in a conveyor which fed the top of the dryer. Thankfully we were able to keep going by drying the grain in batches, rather than continuous flow, and using the one leg to both empty and fill the dryer. It was a slow process, but we only had about 100 tonnes to dry at this point, so we managed.

The Weather

Away back in April I wondered if we were in for a wet harvest, as the spring had been so dry, and so it has turned out. To be fair though, it hasn’t been soaking wet (yet), but there has been some rain most days, which has meant that we never really got a good run at things. The weather station report below illustrates this clearly:

Harvest lasted a total of 52 days, in which only 14 had no rain at all. Yet we had less than 100mm in that time. It is not unknown for a wet month to be in excess of 120mm, so the main problem was the frequency of the rain, rather than the total amount. We were glad we finished when we did, as the good harvest days since the 19th September have been very few indeed.

Harvest Results

Looking at the broad picture it has been an average harvest. The winter barley was disappointing, coming in at 5.74 tonnes/hectare, which is below our 5 year average of 6.66 tonnes/hectare. Partly this was due to the disaster we had in one field that had a bad infestation of sterile brome (1.4 tonnes/hectare). This was our fault rather than the year, and when it is taken out the equation things don’t look quite so poor. Pretty much all the winter barley was up the hill this year, and when compared with similar spring barley, it is holding its own.

Spring barley came in at 6.38 tonnes/hectare, which is slightly above our 5 year average of 6.15 tonnes/hectare. However looking just at the average hides the quite a lot. Yields ranged from 4.02 tonnes/hectare – 7.97 tonnes/hectare, depending on what soil type and where on the farm. Also, all the higher yielding fields were growing either Concerto or Laureate, which went away for malting at a premium.

Partly because of the poor weather we chopped more straw than we normally would. It was hard enough finding good weather to cut the crop, never mind bale the straw, and we still have one field that we sold in the bout still lying there.

In Summary

I think this has been one of the hardest harvests I’ve done, though it may be that my memory is playing tricks. It is never much fun when the farmyard and fields are muddy, and you can’t get on with the work you know needs to be done. As usual I am grateful to the various companies and organisations that helped us. In no particular order: Stuart Miller and the mechanics at Sellars who kept the combine going; Jock Elliot and the drivers at Chrystal Petroleum who somehow managed to keep both the dryer and combine going in fuel even at short notice sometimes, and to Brian and David Addison who were available to help when it was most needed.

I will finish with a picture I took of the combine on the last evening just before I finished. The dogs are perhaps the only ones who are disappointed to see the end of harvest, as they get a far better view from the combine than they do the tractor!

Harvest 17 Update: Week 5 – a time of reckoning?

A combine harvester is a very important piece of kit for us, as all we grow are combinable crops. This past week or so the combine has been on my mind more than usual during harvest, and I fear a time of reckoning is not far away.

The Combine Story

Our combine is quite old. It was already old when it came to us for harvest in 2011, and had done over 1200 engine hours, which is quite a bit. Things were a bit tight financially and our combine was needing major repairs, so when this one came available my thinking was it would do us for 5 seasons. By that time I hoped things might have improved enough for us to consider a newer combine, but it is now in its 7th season with us. Don’t get me wrong, it has been a really good and reliable combine, but I fear it is starting to show its age.

In an earlier post I mentioned that we’d had to get Stuart out to look at an oil leak. This is still on going, and I have nursed the combine through harvest with a view to getting it fixed when it is in for its winter service. I was giving the combine its routine 100 hour service this morning, and noticed another oil leak. I’ve seen this one before, and I know it is quite a big job to repair, so this is definitely one for the winter time. With harvest nearing an end, I’ll keep an eye on it and the relevant oil level, with a view to adding it to the winter repair list.

Unfortunately I had to get Stuart out again this afternoon. I’d stopped to move a tractor and trailer, and the noise I heard coming from the cleaning fan was not good. Turns out the thrust bearing is going, and when he took it apart, various other bits are going too. So I had to stop this afternoon while he orders up the bits to get it fixed.

And so I am going to have to think about replacing it. It is the usual dilemma of how much money do you spend on repairs before calling a halt, and changing it? The middle of harvest is not the time to think about changing, so we’ll revisit it sometime before Christmas. The idea of changing it was at the back of my mind earlier, and I’d organised a demonstration of a New Holland combine for last week. It was only here for a couple of hours, but it was enough for me to consider changing make. I’ll discuss the whole thing in a later blog post.

On a brighter note, Brian and I managed to make repairs to the straw chopper, so although my thrust is going at least my chopper is working!

Harvest Progress

Since I last posted we have made good progress despite the efforts of the weather. As of Sunday night we were 80% through harvest, with only a few fields left to do that were ready. This coming week will see us catch up, and be waiting for perhaps 10 days until the last of it ripens off.

Yields and quality have been fairly good, with almost all the Laureate making the grade for malting, and what Concerto has been lifted has done so too. We were struggling for space at one point, but East of Scotland Farmers managed to lift the last of the Laureate, which allowed us to move the Concerto down to that shed. This in turn allowed us to start harvesting the third variety of spring barley we have – Belgravia. We started it on Saturday, and we had cut all that was ready by Sunday evening.

Robert Doig was in lifting his potatoes this week. I had meant to get some photos, but he was over the ground so fast I never got down.

Finally we are trying an experiment by selling some straw in the bout through Tayforth Machinery Ring.

They organise the baling, and there were two massive square balers in on Sunday baling a field. I had to go and stack them with the forklift after, and they will be lifted by lorry at some point in the next few weeks.

Harvest17 Update: Week 4

I thought I’d start this week with a picture of us actually combining something. Progress is being made, and all my indicators and benchmarks point to the fact that we are now half way through harvest. As a rough rule of thumb, harvest takes about 8 weeks from start to finish, so time wise we are half way. The total are to be harvested is now slightly less than the area we have cut, so that makes us just over half way. Finally, the combine has successfully cut round 3 out of the 5 pylons in fields growing combinable crops. This guide is not as accurate this year, and I would imagine by the time I am writing the next update there will be no pylons left to cut round.

Weather wise, things were so-so. We got combining on Monday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon, and again on Saturday and Sunday. Friday was a washout, which meant that although we were cutting on Saturday the grain was very wet, so has taken a bit of drying. The general theme of the year continued, with lots of little bits of rain which stopped us cutting without there being a deluge.

Stuart Millar working on the combine – never a good sign.

We had to call on Stuart Millar from Sellars this week. Stuart has looked after our combines for a number of years, and I’m sure his heart sinks every time he sees my number when his phone rings.

When I was putting on the straw chopper I noticed drips of oil down the side of the combine. He suspected that the hydraulic oil cooler was cracked, which is not good. However, he cleaned things up, tightened up a couple of hose clips, and things appeared to get better. He left me with instructions to keep an eye on things.

Another problem we are having this year is brackling in the barley.

Brackling is when the stem breaks over half way up when the crop is ripe. This means that instead of the head being held up in the air, it is hanging inches off the ground. When the combine cutter bar cuts the straw, the head drops on the ground, rather than go in the combine.

We try to help the situation by fitting lifters to the front of the cutter bar, which lifts the heads up a bit. It does help, but if the brackling is really bad, then there isn’t much else you can do.

On a brighter note, all the samples of Laureate spring barley have made malting standards this year. We sell our malting barley to East Of Scotland Farmers, and they have uplifted 4 lorry loads this week. It is the usual story though, that every farmer in the country has malting barley to be moved, so you cannot always get lorries in when you need them. We have successfully juggled our shed space so far this year, but things could get interesting next week when we start cutting a different variety.

In summary I have to say that we now at least feel as though we are getting somewhere. The forecast is good for the next week, and we have a few fields ready to harvest, so by the next update I am hoping to report good progress.

Harvest 17 Update: Week 3

Well, it is just as well us farmers are by nature uncomplaining cheery chappies! The photo below shows the closest I got to harvest for most of the week – and even then it was raining!

Closest I got to harvest for most of the week!

The weather was again against us, but as a consolation there wasn’t really that much ready. We had one field of what was supposed to be winter barley to cut, which I duly did on Thursday, but it didn’t take long. We always seem to have one disaster, and this field was it. Basically the weed control was less than adequate, and the field was taken over by a grass weed called sterile brome. It had swamped out pretty much all the barley. To make matters worse, I had a breakdown on the combine when the knife bar broke.

As can be seen from the bottom picture, it has been going for some time. You can see a small area of silver at the top left corner. That is the fresh break, the rest of the break is rusted, meaning that it has been exposed to air, and is therefore older.

It didn’t take too long to fix, and I was up and running again within an hour.

Thankfully on Saturday the sun appeared, and a good drying wind got going. We were able to make a start to the spring barley in the afternoon after getting the dryer cleared of the last of the winter barley.

The spring barley has to be kept separate as it is destined (hopefully) for the malting market. Also, I disabled the straw chopper on the combine, as we are selling the straw to a neighbour, who arrived with his baler on Sunday.

Other developments included the dryer being fixed – many thanks to Charlie Pryde for coming out on Monday and putting things right. All 3 burners have worked perfectly since then. Finally we lost our ‘trainee farmer’ this week when Cameron went back to school on Wednesday. Hopefully he’ll still be happy to help us out at weekends.

Harvest 17 Update: Week 2

Well, that has certainly been some week! I think we’ve about had it all. Rain, sun, breakdowns… We’re only 2 weeks in to harvest and I’m shattered already.

We’ll start with the weather. The forecast was (generally speaking) right, in that it was a much better week. Consequently we managed to get on well with harvest, almost finishing the winter barley by Sunday evening.

Grain moistures also dropped significantly, starting off the week at over 23%, and by about Friday, this had fallen to around 16%. To store grain safely, it needs to be dried below 15% moisture content, so getting it cut reasonably dry saves a bit of money in drying costs. There was, however, some really beefy showers, and it is shaping up to be a wet(ish) harvest – when a cloud passes over you, you get wet.

It also means that getting about the fields can become a problem, as the picture shows. At this stage we are just worried about getting the crop off, but tracks like this can cause problems when it comes to establishing the next crop.

Breakdowns. We’ve had our fair share of these already, but thankfully nothing so far that has been a show stopper. The combine picked up a stone one evening. Combine harvesters do not like stones at all. Thanks to a rapid reaction from the driver, serious damage was avoided, but we lost 4 retractable fingers, at least one of which went right through the combine, breaking straw chopper blades on the way out. On Saturday morning we decided we would attempt to repair the broken blades, and according to the instruction manual it was a simple process of ‘remove plate from side of combine, remove pin and holding rod, replace blades through slot, reinsert rod and pin.’ Being a farmer you have to be a jack of all trades, but one skill is to know when to stop. We got as far as ‘remove pin and holding rod ‘, and couldn’t find the pin. We noticed at the same time that the rod in question had a bit of a bow, which would mean it could be difficult to remove, and even more difficult to put back in. We decided to quit while we were ahead, so the straw chopper will not be chopping so finely for the rest of the season, and Sellars can fix things properly when the combine goes in for its winter service.

The other breakdown we had was at the grain dryer. There are 3 diesel fired burners, but we only really use 2 as we don’t dry at high temperatures. Despite them all being service before harvest, 1 decided not to work at all, 1 decided to only start after the dryer had been running for about 20 minutes, and the other 1 sometimes started first time, sometimes not. So once you got it going in the morning, you hoped you didn’t have to stop it until either the wet bin was empty, or you were shutting it down for the night. Getting hold of an engineer to help us was a challenge, so we have nursed it through the week. Hopefully someone is coming on Monday afternoon to fix things for us.

However, when things were going, we got on really well. I’ll finish with a picture of the combine cutting winter barley with Clatto wind turbine in the background.

Harvest 17 Update: Week 1

This screen shot from the weather station pretty much describes how harvest has gone this week. As reported earlier, we cut one tankful on Sunday afternoon, and have slowly picked away at it for the rest of the week, but it hasn’t been easy.
The total amount of rain isn’t that vast (I’ve seen more than that fall in one day in the past), but it is the fact that there has been some every day. Thursday was the best day, where we cut around 30 tonnes. Yesterday (Saturday), I got 3 tonnes cut before the big showers started to hit. We had a record rain rate at about 5.30pm, but thankfully it only fell at that rate for a few seconds!
The other side effect of the poor weather is that we are chopping all the straw so far. Not much point in leaving it in the bout just for it to get soaked, and lie for a week.
The weather forecast for the coming week is better, so fingers crossed.

Complete and Total Disarray!

Same thing happens every year, and I make myself the same promises that I’ll do better for next year, only to break every last one of them. I’m talking about harvest preparations. Harvest preparations really start at the end of the previous harvest. The grain dryer needs cleaned out, the elevator boot needs cleaned out, the area around the grain pit needs swept and hoovered. Trouble is, after harvest I’m knackered, and the last thing I want to do is clear up. ‘I’ll do it later, when I’m not so busy’.
Later gets, well, later. There is the autumn sowing to be done, then we are in to winter. ‘It’s cold, I don’t want to go and clear up… I’ll do it later, when I’m not so busy’. Christmas comes and goes, and then before I know it, we are getting ready to sow the spring crops. ‘There’s too much to do, I’ll get it done when we have finished sowing, when I’m not so busy…’ You get the picture.
In my defence, this year has been a wee bit tough, and I’ve not had the time I might usually do. So if anything things were more rushed than normal. However, we have got there. Sheds are clean, elevator boot empty, dryer ready to go, combine all serviced. Just in time for the rain to come on! I managed to cut one combine tankful before the deluge this afternoon, so harvest is officially underway.

It’s Still All About the Weather!

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.

If you are interested in seeing what the weather is like at Cults Farm at the moment, then you can see here.