Difficult harvest nears its end

“We‘ve had a tremendous 10 days of harvest, with huge amounts been done.”


He only has 16ha (40 acres) of wheat remaining, from a total of 135ha (330 acres).


“With less than a day‘s cutting to do we‘re back on schedule. The wheat quality has been a big surprise for the right reasons.”


His Consort and Savannah had specific weights of 76kg/hl and according to the yield monitor on the combine it came off at 10 t/ha (4.05 t/acre).


But he was disappointed by the results from his Rogibus and has decided to cut back his seed order from 12 tonnes to 8 tonnes.


Mr Cumming‘s intentions were to drop Consort, but after Consort yielded the best this year he has decided to keep it. He will roughly split his wheat three ways to include Rogibus, Savannah and Consort.


He thinks his Optic spring barley has all made malting quality, but his Chalice all went for feed, as it suffered from Fusarium and other fungal diseases. He thinks this might be due to the crop being under sown with grass which may have passed on the diseases.


“The spring barley this year has been full of surprises.”


Mr Cumming says this has been a difficult year because most of the harvesting had to be done on the weekends leading to high labour costs and with the wet weather and high drying costs, it‘s proved to be expensive.


To make things worse prices are low, he added.


“By the end of this week (w/e Sept 10) most farmers will have finished in this area. We‘ll be happy to see the back of this harvest,” said Mr Cumming.

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