So much for my master plan to stop herbicide damage to my rye by drilling early.

Since drilling the rye on the 18 September, we have averaged 8mm a day for the past four weeks.

The rye emerged beautifully and even turned green in the rows. It got to two true leaves and then it started to pick up the pre-emergence and has been thinned by at least 50%.

See also: How an organic estate hits £1,000/ha gross margins

About the author

Robin Aird

Arable Farmer Focus writer Robin Aird manages 1500ha on the north Wiltshire and Gloucestershire border, with a further 160ha on a contract farming agreement. Soils vary from gravel to clay with the majority silty clay loams. The diverse estate has Residential, commercial and events enterprises. He is Basis qualified and advises on other farming businesses.

Read more articles by Robin Aird

On a positive note, we managed to get all the maize cut before the rain and even cultivated the stubbles to get a good chit of blackgrass.

Maize yields were above average, which was helpful following a not-so-good cereal harvest.

The ground is so wet I do not see an opportunity to plant any winter wheat.

Instead, we have covered our wheat area with spring barley seed. The benefit of this is that we should be able to finally get on top of a bad block of blackgrass – every cloud has a silver lining.

We have revisited our budgets post-harvest and done a profit projection for the year.

The results are looking incredibly positive considering how hard the growing season has been, once again proving to us that cost control and embracing the new Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) schemes are imperative to keep the business moving in the right direction.

The winter ahead will be filled with hedge cutting, ditching and drain jetting jobs as our new grant-funded drain jetter has arrived.

I have booked another mini digger for eight weeks to work alongside our excavator, as nearly every field on the farm has a hedge and ditch on all sides.

The aim is to rotationally maintain these ditches over the next four years.

We have also done a survey of all the hedges on the farm and these will be going into a new SFI agreement shortly.

One action this has highlighted is that we cut the bottoms of our hedges too tight, so we going to change the shape of our hedges going forward to an A.

As I finish writing this, I notice that we have just hit our annual rainfall for the year – 968mm. Surely that means that the tap now turns off?