Farmer Focus: Biblical rainfall leaves re-seeds in a mess
Billy Lewis © Richard Stanton I’m under the impression that in the east of the country farmers are patiently waiting for some rain. However, I can assure you that here in the west this is not the case.
I expected we’d have some flashbacks to the miserable autumn of 2023. What I didn’t anticipate, is that they would arrive as early as mid-September.
An evening of biblical rainfall last weekend saw us on the receiving end of about 40mm of rain over the period of an hour.
Unfortunately, this has done no favours at all for our grass seeds which were only planted a few days before.
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Two of the fields that were planted using reduced tillage have fared reasonably well. However, the two fields that were ploughed are a complete mess.
I’m just hoping we don’t end up with too many bare patches so that in the spring it’s a quick stitch-in job.
Ironically, I now need it to keep raining steadily for a while so that the soil doesn’t become capped before the seed is able to emerge.
Continued rainfall in the week following this has also slammed the breaks on any hopes we had of getting cereals drilled in a more timely manner this year.
It’s looking like it’ll be mid-October before much gets drilled now, which is fine.
Instead of being able to get on with field work we have been tidying up the yard in preparation for the Farm Carbon Toolkit’s annual field day that we hosted here at Boycefield on 26 September.
The focus of this year’s event, which around 150 people attended, was “The value of mixed farming”. Given the current challenges facing the combinable crops sector, it was a very interesting day.
There were some big hitters from the world of regenerative agriculture lined up to give talks.
The event was centred on three stations: a soil pit, a mob-grazing demonstration and an arable workshop. This was followed by some panel discussions back at the yard.
