A noisy night in a Travelodge only 10m from the A1 on the way to Cereals 2008 further confirmed to me how lucky I am to live in a rural setting - well rural for Kent anyway.
At the event I was fascinated by a visit to the Soil Solutions stand. Here they had plots showing how their ‘prescription nutrition' programme of fertilisers and micronutrients could help crops.
I've recently started down this track and was pleased, and in fact amazed, to see that a plot of wheat with no nitrogen applied at all but given this programme still looked relatively green next to its completely unfertilised and yellow neighbour.
There were also a number of products in the pipeline such as a phosphite seed treatment and a foliar nitrogen. This ‘not quite there' scenario was echoed at the Speciality Fertilizer Products stand where products to enhance nitrogen and phosphate availability were just around the corner, and at Martin Lishman's display which promoted a brewing system for making a compost ‘tea', the potential great benefits of which were as yet unquantified in the UK.
I felt as though a barman had just poured me a pint and then walked off leaving it just out of reach behind the bar.
Amongst a million other things the new Vaderstad Seed Hawk drill really stood out. It looks a very decent tool to me for the direct drilling (sorry Mr Reynolds I mean no-till!), route I would ideally follow.
The salesman even told me I could pull a 6m version with 150hp, so I was just getting out my cheque-book when he mentioned the retail price of £53,000 - I settled for a coffee and a sit down instead.
Back on the farm we are making hay, which is a relief after last year when the weather forced production into the middle of harvest, which rather stretched our slimline workforce. Nufol should also go on the milling wheat one evening this week.
I'm still not convinced the world is going to harvest a massive crop this year - something is bound to go wrong somewhere. Let's just hope it isn't here!
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More diary entries in our Barometers' Over the Hedge series