Like all farmers I’m deeply frustrated by the Labour government’s Budget. All those promises made at the NFU conference have turned out to be lies.

Like most farms, we will be affected by inheritance tax thresholds and more immediately by the delinking of the Basic Payment Scheme.

The rollout of the Sustainable Farming Incentive has been frustratingly slow and the expanded offer we applied for back in September has still not been approved.

See also: New winter malting barley variety granted full brewing approval

About the author

Keith Challen

Arable Farmer Focus writer

Keith Challen manages 1,200ha of heavy clay soils in the Vale of Belvoir, Leicestershire, for Belvoir Farming Company. Cropping includes wheat, oilseed rape and elderflowers. The farm is also home to the Belvoir Fruit Farms drinks business.

Read more articles by Keith Challen

We’ve only received emails with frustrating excuses as to why our application has yet to be processed.

We keep being promised £5bn over the next two years, but where is it? it simply isn’t good enough.

Thankfully, we finally got drilled up on 9 November. We even had time to re-drill a couple of fields where I had lost my nerve and drilled them early, only to see high levels of blackgrass emerging within the wheat.

All-in-all, I’m pleased with our new one system fits all approach.

One pass with our homemade low disturbance subsoiler towing a press and then one pass with the Horsch Avatar drill.

Emergence has been pretty good, although we did switch to the home-made tine drill for a few fields when it was really wet.

I’m convinced the deep tine is the way forward for us, we coped better this year with 216mm of rain between subsoiling and drilling than previous years when we’d had less.

Another positive step towards our no-till farming system has been our Redekop seed control unit on the combine.

Initially, the key driver for adopting this system was for the control of weed seeds, but one thing that has become apparent is how good it is at controlling volunteers as well.

Direct-drilled wheat behind spring barley would normally require a good stale seed-bed to get volunteers to grow before spraying off.

However, with no viable seeds after going through the combine, the stale seed-bed is no longer necessary, allowing us to drill when we like.