OPINION: My love-hate relationship with the start of harvest
Late July finds me in a clairvoyant frame of mind.
I can guess what many of you are thinking: “Should I be having a nibble?” Late yesterday evening as you lay in bed, you could have sworn that you heard your neighbour at it in the distance and that’s given you a sleepless night.
I have a love-hate relationship with the start of harvest. I enjoy what is the beginning of the end of the farming year, but I’m also constantly fretting over being premature.
I find myself staring at rubbed-out samples of barley and rape until I’m boggle-eyed. Like a neurotic interior designer, I start to worry whether a colour would be best described as deep red or light mauve. There is also the much-deliberated issue of whether what you have in your hand is a yellowy-green or is it actually more of a greeny-yellow.
Then there the first law of farming – commonly known as “sods law”. I can almost guarantee that if I start cutting things a little green and damp, then the following week the weather will set fair while I’m manacled to the drier trying to sort out 300t of underripe barley that flows with all the ease of porridge made with copydex.
On the other hand, if I abide by the old farming lore that when you think the crop is ripe then you should go on holiday for a week – you can rest assured I will return from said holiday to monsoon-like weather while over the hedge my neighbours have harvested their fields in near perfect conditions.
It’s that time of year when some farmers have been known to drive tractors towing empty trailers past other farmyards to pretend they have started harvesting. Their sole intention is to sow seeds of disquiet in the minds of their neighbours. There is nothing more unsettling than thinking your neighbour has started harvest before you.
It’s the same schoolboy mentality that finds me in the pub telling my neighbours that I’m a bit disappointed that in the first field my barley only seems to be averaging 8t/ha which on our farm is regarded as a crop failure.
This, you understand, is my opening gambit in the game of “pub yield trumps”. Then there is calibrating the combine yield meter with kilo weights set at more than a hundred. While I realise it’s ridiculous to suggest barley has the same density as dry sand it remains, nonetheless, a reliable way of boosting recorded yields.
Just to add to the intrigue, I’m also putting it about that I sold most my 2013 harvest in late 2012 when cereal futures hit £200/t-plus. Furthermore, in my more colourful moments I tell people that such is my marketing sophistication that I have sold my crop in a basket of currencies, mainly Thai Barts and Happy Shopper vouchers, to protect myself from exchange rate movements.The sad fact is when it comes to currency markets I’m actually more Nick Leeson than George Soros.
I will leave you with best wishes for a good harvest. So far this year we’ve had floods when we wanted dry weather and drought when we wanted some rain. What could possibly go wrong in August?
Guy Smith comes from a mixed family farm on the north-east Essex coast. The farm is officially recognised as the driest spot in the British Isles. Situated on the coast close to Clacton-on-Sea, the business is well diversified with a golf course, shop, fishing lakes and airstrip.
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