Adrian Harrison waves goodbye to his grass seed after flooding
Well, as I sit here writing my article I am not surprisingly looking out at yet another wet day. The shopping delivery has just arrived and this week’s driver is an ex-farmer who, sensibly, left dairying, but still has arable and tops up his lifestyle with working and delivering for a well-known supermarket.
We had a chat as usual and he was saying that he had just sold some wheat last week for over £200/t and within a week the price had increased by £15. My question is, as there has been a 6.5% milk production decrease for the month of October, why are we not seeing an increase in our price for milk?
The wet weather has meant my re-seeding of riverside pasture has not been a huge success. Two weeks after re-seeding we had unprecedented massive flooding and guess what? Twenty percent of my hard work was washed down the Ure. I am sure someone down on the banks of the Ouse, near York, will have a very lush looking pasture as a result.
The last of the youngstock are now housed and we are monitoring silage stocks closely. With no alternative feeds available at the moment it makes it a very precarious situation. We thought we had a bumper crop of silage, but our first-cut silage is 22% dry matter and the cows are going through it at a rapid rate of knots.
Adrian Harrison farms 81ha (200 acres) in partnership with his father Maurice in Wensleydale, Yorkshire. He runs 130 pedigree Jersey cows with 70 followers, with milk sold to Wensleydale Creamery, Hawes, and used to make real Wensleydale cheese