Farmer Focus: Tricky borage harvest and triple-purpose maize
© Jason Bye August seemed to be an extra-long month this year, mainly because harvest was completed early, and we were waiting for rain before getting on with land work.
We did try a bit of soil loosening in the dry conditions, but had a few issues with the low-disturbance subsoiler. We were only going in about 8in, “topsoiling”, because that is all that is required.
However, we started running out of shear bolts and there were cracks appearing on the welds for the leg-mounting brackets.
See also: Maize Watch 2022: Advice for a safe maize harvest
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A few millimetres of rain helped enormously. Tight land has been loosened and cover crops drilled and starting to grow in the warm and moist conditions.
A mix of beans, mustard and buckwheat has gone in on land destined for borage.
This year’s borage – as we expected – was a tricky crop to harvest. Being short and thin due to lack of rain, it was a tall order to swath it into a nice row that would sit up for our Draper header.
It is frustrating to leave crop in the field worth more than £3,000/t, but it just wasn’t possible to collect it all. Thanks to Hew’s skills on the combine we ended up with an average of 280kg/ha, which we are content with.
At one point in early summer, we weren’t certain we would have a crop at all. And hooray, for the first time of growing it, I didn’t have the slow and painful job of drying the borage.
Looking over the hedge at crops of maize in Essex now is a bit sobering. Crops just haven’t had sufficient rain.
Husband Charlie has a maize maze at his garden centre, which is a great attraction over the school holidays.
Being just a few acres, it doesn’t normally get too much attention from anyone who might need maize, but this year it has been snapped up to go to an anaerobic digester plant.
A strip of it will be left for his brother Alan’s game birds too, so I call a that a triple-purpose crop.
