Farmer Focus: British agriculture drowning in a sea of red tape
Keith Challen @ Tim Scrivener As the storms pass, I can’t help but feel we got away lightly, with nothing more than a few branches on fields to contend with.
I did think there was a certain irony as a short clip on TikTok showed a barge carrying an excavator working on flood defences washed away by the very floods it tried to protect against.
I resisted the urge to get stuck into spring drilling just before the wet weather descended, as the whole point of spring drilling here is to help with the war against blackgrass.
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Hopefully, we get another flush when soils warm up and, with soil temperatures averaging about 4C, there is still plenty of time.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but it needs to pass the bottom test before we drill.
I’ve just spent the past couple of days preparing for our Red Tractor inspection, and couldn’t help but turn to social media to see how others were getting on with theirs.
I read how the wrong “No Smoking” signage and the wrong handwash had caused non-compliances. I can’t help but wonder if this organisation needs a revamp.
It just feels like British agriculture is drowning in a sea of its own red tape.
The past couple of weeks’ bad weather has put the team in the workshop. Their first job was to make a couple of swath rollers for the grain-carting tractors.
With the Geringhoff header cutting the stubble so short, we were struggling last year to get the straw swath under the tractors. I knew it was worth keeping those 30-year-old Bettison drill wheels.
The next job is to modify a potato bed-former to make some raised beds for next year’s new elderflowers.
We struggle growing them on the clay when it gets wet, so we are going to try raised beds. What could possibly go wrong putting a rotary cultivator into wet, cold clay soils?
Hopefully, we can incorporate some compost to make it less inhospitable, and cover with woodchip for weed control.
