Opinion: It’s been another ‘perfectly average’ harvest
© Ryna/Adobe Stock My first full-time job was on a training scheme with one of the large corporate farming businesses.
Fettling with some hail nets on one stunning spring morning, we stopped for a cuppa amid the apple blossom.
The orchards were radiant with flowers and buzzing with pollinators.
Being a simple arable lad, I had no real idea whether the magnificent-looking crop I was propped up against was actually any good.
So when I got in, I questioned the farm manager, a Kiwi with an acute sense of wit and sarcasm. I remember the exchange going roughly as follows.
“They look sweet as, bro,” he explained, woolly jumper on, gum boots up to mid-calf, his Canterbury shorts only just about long enough to not land him on a register.
See also: Opinion – it’s time to tighten up on spending
About the author
“I love this time of year – so much potential, so much promise. Now – as you’ll come to learn – we’re just one minor disaster after another away from getting right the way through to yet another perfectly average harvest.”
And so the combinable harvest of 2023 has turned out to be perfectly average.
As an agronomist, I like to claim that there’s a lot more to it than this, but there are only really two things that drive yield on our moisture-retentive soils – good establishment and sunlight levels in the early summer.
Get all the other stuff vaguely in the ball park of correctness – fertiliser, disease control and all that jazz – and the rest will follow.
We got the establishment right, but sunlight levels were low.
With significantly more wheat than we have ever grown before (that’s the free market in action, folks; remember when you could sell it for £300/t?), I was looking at the abysmal forecast in early August wondering how on earth we were going to get it all dry.
A month on, you can thank me for some settled weather because how I responded to this situation was to panic-buy a grain dryer that I am yet to even turn on.
As it turned out, the combinable harvest this year was completed on 19 August, bang on average.
I do usually enjoy driving a combine, but I’ll be honest, the joy was waning by the end of this harvest – too much recumbent wheat that necessitated a lot of reversing and replacement lifters.
I would have had words with the agronomist, were it not for the fact that I am the agronomist.
Dad had mitigated the decision to grow a lot more than our usual area last autumn by selling a great slug of this year’s harvest forward at the time – so, by historical standards, our average price will not be too shabby.
But costs of production were high and, unlike one of my fellow Lincolnshire columnists, I’ve not yet ordered a Discovery 5.
The combine maintained its own running average of one predictably expensive breakdown per season, which just for fun this year necessitated emptying the very full grain tank without the usual assistance of the unloading spout.
Stuart, our local combine whiz, had the side of the grain tank welded up faster than he could say: “You’re in luck, there’s one of those cross augers in the country.”
Just the spuds and beet left, then. Given that most of these were planted in mid-May, I’ll be jolly pleased for an average harvest here, too.