Out in the Fields

These articles are written by Seumas Foster and are reproduced by kind permission of  Hill and Dale magazine.

September 2009

The Diary tells its Story.

12 months is a crop cycle and what a difference from one year to the next. Last year harvest wasn’t finished until the end of September, this year the end came soon after the August Bank Holiday, a much more ‘normal’ time to harvest the crops. The last crops to cut were beans and linseed but a few sunny days in early September came just right to complete the job.

A feature of the this year was the slowness of the crops to ripen, they seemed to hang on longer than seemed reasonable due too the cool wet weather in July, the consequence of that is the moisture content of the grain was reluctant to drop below 15%, so most crops were cut at a high moisture content and needed to be dried in store.

Spring barley in particular showed this immaturity this year, and some of the stubbles have started to shoot again from the old plants, a sign that the plants were not fully mature and dead at harvest.

Budget Buster

The yields have generally been good, although the crops have tended to follow the predictions which could be made according to the delayed drilling last year, soil fertility, etc. In other words the good crops did well again, and the poor crops struggled.

 N.B. Establishment is everything.

The prices being offered for the harvest has gone through the floor this summer, the fluctuations in the ‘world market’ are having a serious effect on farm gate prices. The prices are lower than they have been for a few years, but could, I suppose, rise again quickly if a supply rumour hits the trading floors again.

Full Circle

The sowing of crops for next year overlapped with harvest. Oil seed rape started in the middle of August into good, moist seedbeds and quickly emerged. The winter cereal sowing started around the 10th of September, again into good seedbeds and emerged within a week. The wind has been blowing steadily for what seems like a month so spraying has been difficult to do.

Autumn

The autumn colours are beginning, the hedges and woods showing the changes and squirrels have appeared to grab what they can.

Lunch

As bees feed on nectar and pollen from plants, wasps are predators and carnivorous, and one warm day in early September I was walking up a field edge next to hedge when I saw a wasp flying in a very cumbersome way at the bottom of the hedge. The wasp was carrying in its jaws a very large round meaty blob which I realised was the abdomen of a spider, minus legs, head and thorax, which the wasp will have clipped off with its jaws. The wasp was struggling to fly with this but while I watched it became clear the wasp needed height, so it was wing hopping onto small branches and then clambering up to the end of the branch and launching up to the next branch, landing and clinging on. The wasp repeated the process of struggling up the branch, hauling this huge meal, and took off again when at the top. This went on several times and the wasp had got about 5 feet off the ground when I left it, hopefully to get back to the nest.

July 2009

IN THE FIELDS                               15.7.09

St Swithin’s Day

St Swithin was a humble monk who suggested that on his death his body should be buried where the rain would fall on him. This was done in 862 AD but in 971AD an attempt was made to move his remains to inside Winchester Cathedral, which was considered more appropriate for a man of his godliness. It is said that his spirit was so outraged that it made the rain fall for the next forty days, until the monks gave up and let him lie.

July can be a proper summer month with plenty of sunshine, but the monks didn’t know about the jet stream and the effect it will have pushing low pressure systems down to bring clouds and rain, displacing the high pressure systems that would bring us cloudless skies and sunshine. The rest of July will be a tense time as the crops ripen and become fit to harvest, waiting to see if there is a change back to welcome high pressures. The memory of the wet delayed harvest last year is still a painful experience. Surely the Jet Stream can’t get fixed in the wrong place too long(?), the apples have been christened well enough already.

Harvest

On the assumption that the harvest has been proceeding ‘normally’ and the timetable is about right the fields will be cleared during August and most of next years Oil Seed rape crops will have been sown. This is a crop that really benefits from an early start while the soil is warm so a good root system can be established before the winter stops growth. Winter cereals are likely to be sown from the middle of September, and with reasonable luck all in by the end of October.

Beans are often the last crop to be harvested, depending on the weather around the end of August.

There has been very little June rain, I have recorded only 32 mm, which followed a low 30mm in May. Some places have been lucky with a bit more rain as local showers, but the effects were starting to show on the droughty areas of fields. In this landscape it is often the valley bottom where the soils dry out first where the soil is replaced by stones.

Some harvesting has started already in mid July, winter barley is the first crop ready for the combine, with the exception of red fescue (a herbage crop grown for seed) which was cut at Woodmancott a week earlier. In the East of England where they have had very little rain since March the winter barley crops have died so the harvest is nearly complete in some areas, not a good sign for a good harvest.

The price of the crops is still low, it always dips at harvest, but the price fell in June and is not coming back, despite dire warnings of shortages, it seems the normal rules of the market are not operating. It is playing havoc with trying to budget for next year.

Have a good summer.

June 2009

What to see in July

July is the ripening month, and harvest should begin this month as some crops mature, certainly winter barley and perhaps winter oil seed rape, but that depends on the weather. The farms are still busy preparing for the looming start of harvest when ‘all leave will be cancelled’, meanwhile the grain storage has to be got ready, harvesting machinery needs to be oiled, greased, and tested, and perhaps for the farm staff some holiday taken.

Uppermost on everyones wish list is good weather and standing crops, surely last year will be the worst we shall have for sometime, the wet weather caused havoc and will not be forgotten for a long time. July is usually a dry month – a good hay making time with any luck- and the warmth will ripen the crops.

Winter barley is always the first to be ready to cut. It is a frequent choice on droughty soils like sands and gravels that dry out because there is a better chance that it will ripen before it dies of drought. Later maturing crops like wheat and beans are much riskier due to the increased chance that they will be unable to get sufficient moisture and die rather than mature properly. Winter barley is a great crop to grow prior to sowing winter oil seed rape, the early harvest gives the farm plenty of time to get the ground ready to sow the oil seed rape by the end of August.

Oil seed rape could be cut in July if we have enough sunshine, and even early maturing varieties of winter wheat could be ready, but it is not likely. Likewise spring barley, in fact if it is ready in July that means it has met an early end and may not have reached its full potential.

Orange Wheat Blossom Midge.

You may have seen white plastic triangular objects (see photo) in a few fields during June- these are pheromone traps for Orange Wheat blossom Midge- hereafter known as OWBM. This is a tiny carrot coloured midge that can be a big problem for wheat crops, and the best way to know if we might need to take control measures is to assess the midge numbers at the critical pre-flowering period of the wheat. The best way is to use a pheromone trap that will attract and catch on a sticky card the male midge so we can find out when they are active. This year the OWBM turned out not to be a problem, the crops were not at the susceptible stage when the midge did appear, except in a very few places so a spray was avoided. There is a Lemon Blossom Wheat Midge too, which the French wheat growers get very excited about, in an agronomic sense.

Bumble Bees

Some plants are particularly attractive to bumble bees, and a big cotoneaster in my garden is one, at the moment while it is flower it is covered with bumbles. I have noticed the first cases of bumble nests being dug out on the road verges by badgers, they excavate the nests during their nocturnal forays. Bumble bee nests are a favourite for the badger.

May 2009

Who Needs the Met Office?

‘The cuckoo comes in April,
He sings his song in May,
In the middle of June he changes his tune,
And in July he flies away.’

‘A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay,
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon,
A swarm of bees in July is worth not a fly.’

‘If the oak is out before the ash,
Then you’ll only get a splash,
But if the ash beats the oak,
Then you can expect a soak.’

Or the alternative version:

‘If ash before the oak,
We shall have a summer of dust and smoke.’

‘You will never get warm settled weather until the cowslips are finished.’

Watch out for St.Vitus’ day June 15th

‘If St.Vitus day be rainy weather,
It will rain for thirty days together.’

Back to the Day Job.

The ‘Factory Floor’, or ‘Production Facility’ has been very busy in the last two months as the crops grow away after the winter, and the majority are not doing badly.
The Oilseed rape came into flower, a bit ragged in many fields after the effects of pests like rabbits and pigeons but more due to quite variable establishment last autumn. More fields than may be good for us had to be ripped up and redrilled with an alternative spring crop.
April rainfall was 49.5mm, and so far May has been dry, in fact the soil surfaces have been getting very dusty, which has been hindering the spring sown seeds. Just about enough precipitation has fallen to avoid problems.

Roadsides.
The bluebells flowered well and so did the wood anenomes, in the hedgerows stitchwort with bright white flowers are very eye-catching, and will keep flowering right through. The wild strawberries have also flowered well, some will know the good banks where they can be found in the parishes and how good they are to eat when they are ripe.
The problem is that it is probable the local council and its verge cutting policy will destroy them, without any valid reason, ecological or H&S, only to ensure the countryside will look and have the characteristics and wildlife of a suburb. 

April 2009

How many shades of green can there be?

March and April are the months when the landscape wakes up after winter and growth gets its running shoes on.( Good luck to anyone running the London Marathon). The hedges progress from twig to bursting buds, as do the trees in a progression according to species, micro climate, and vigour.
The crops in the fields will also start to grow with new leaves coming to replace the leaves that carried the crop through the winter and are now spent. These old leaves are probably carrying some old disease, and may have suffered with the frosts and wind during the short day months of winter. These leaves have done the work to establish the crops and give them the essential base for the spring and summer rush to bring the crop to harvest.
Of course the spring plantings of spring barley, spring beans and spring oilseed rape with a bit of linseed are emerging as the soil warms up and the at first the rows of seed can be seen when the sunlight illuminates the green shoots, quickly growing as more leaves appear to cover the gaps between the rows.

The start of field work.
After winter comes the first field work, looking after the crops, feeding them with fertiliser and controlling weeds and pests as necessary so they can grow away. Now that the whole area is in the new Nitrate Vulnerable Zone the emphasis is on avoiding any surplus nutrients that could leach away, only adding what the crops need to reach their potential after the soil and organic supply has been assessed.

Local Agricultural Education

Sparsholt College near Winchester well known by many people as the centre for ‘Land Based Learning’ in Hampshire, and now goes well beyond just teaching farming. On a visit recently I noticed a plaque on the Farm Office that gave a bit of background to the start of Agricultural Education in the county. The first ‘Hampshire Farm School’ was at Old Basing between 1899 and 1913 when it moved to the present site.

Can Agriculture lead the way in energy savings and alternative fuels?

Imagine what would happen if the supply of diesel or petrol stopped and no further supplies were available. Farming has reached the stage with mechanisation that it would be impossible to produce the crops that we can now. The food supply would reduce dramatically and hunger would follow, possibly worse. And yet it is only relatively recently that most of the energy for crop production came from the farm itself, as food for draught horses, or wood for heating and to facilitate steam power.
Because of the importance of Agriculture to produce food it would be logical that we should look to Agriculture to lead the way by developing means of production that do  not rely on fossil fuels. More encouragement and support for research from Government in this area would be a positive and timely start.
It should be that farming is the leader in developments because the farm is where the raw materials will need to come from, and simply going ‘organic’ is not the solution.

The Balance of the Food Chain

As Spring gets going so the food supply for all the wildlife in the fields becomes plentiful, but the balance of the food chain is the important factor to maintain the diversity around us. Should one link in the food chain gain the upper hand then the ‘food’ below it will be reduced until shortages cause a pendulum-swing back again. In order to protect the local song birds, finches, etc., from the predators like crows and magpies some management of their breeding success is required, an important principle that the RSPB is reluctant to admit.

Weather Forecasting

To most the continuous interest in the weather forecast displayed by the farming community is maybe a bit boring, only those whose livelihood is weather dependent can understand. If the long term weather prospects could be better divined then fortunes can be made, so all the signs from sunspots to seaweed and jet streams are eagerly inspected.
I would like to add another ‘weather sign’ that should be given a lot of attention, it seems  there is a direct correlation between the number of press articles extolling the virtues of a holiday in the UK and the summer rainfall. The papers are currently full of the advantages and benefits of staying here and spurning the euro zone, it will undoubtedly be a wet summer!  

March 2009

 In The Fields

Useful weeks of Good Conditions.

We were away for the snow, and so we missed all the fun. I bet lots of people were out taking pictures of the weather so I look forward to seeing the entries in the appropriate class in the Villages Show.

Since we got back in the middle of February we have had two spells of dry settled weather of sufficient length to get some work done on the farms. In the first spell some spring barley was sown on the lighter chalksoils, and spring beans were sown on the medium soils that had been ploughed before Christmas. We also had a good look at a lot of the late sown Oil Seed Rape crops to see if they had survived the winter and could still produce an economic crop. I’m afraid that some failed and have been scheduled for replacement. By contrast the early sown crops are very promising, but because of the late harvest and wet conditions last autumn are probably in the minority. The crops that need to be replaced will probably go into spring Oil Seed Rape or Spring Barley.  One variety of spring OSR, ‘Nexara’, is chosen for the quality of the oil it produces and is used extensively in the food industry, McDonalds use it for cooking its ’product’. The integration of grower to end user will be seen in high profile far more often in the future.

The second spell of good weather, a settled period of high pressure and warm air, has seen the rest of the Spring Barley sown, and a few crops of Peas. The spring Oil Seed Rape will still have to wait because a cooler period is forecast to follow, and it is not good to have the seed sitting in cold and perhaps wet soil for long. This would be the sort of conditions when the seed would rot or be vulnerable to pest attack, and it is better to be cautious at this stage. Any Spring Linseed that is planned will also have to wait until more reliable conditions.

Save Diesel , use Frost 

Frost is a fantastic ‘worker’of the soil, fields that were ploughed before Christmas and then left to the weather have easily worked down into almost perfect seedbeds, all due to the action of the frosts breaking up the wet unstructured plough slab to give the lovely friable crumb tilth that so easily produces the seedbed needed for a good start of the crop. The benefit of the frost has not been seen for a few years.

GM Crops

About 90% of the soya crop in America is from GM crops, usually a built-in herbicide tolerance for easy weed control, and most bought products use soya derivatives in some way - look at the ingredients on the packaging- without any apparent disadvantage or disaster. If Europe continues to resistant GM crops then our future will be in niche markets, not necessary a problem but it could be restrictive, and lead to more reliance on imported food.

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Page last edited on 6 Oct 2009     © 2002-2008 Ellisfield Parish Council