Farmer Focus: Harvest 2016 average the worst for 30 years

It’s been a month now since my last article and frustratingly I have to report that harvest here started badly and got steadily worse.

We have only just finished, with yields that have turned out to be my worst overall average for 30 years. As I feared, wheat has been very disappointing, regardless of variety.

The general consensus seems to place the blame on poor weather earlier in the year that affected the size of the heads and then further dull weather when it came to filling them.

See also: Read more from our Arable Farmer Focus writers

The result was a smaller-than-average number of grains that were poorly filled. I reckon I am down a total of at least 200t on where I would normally be.

This is a big blow for a farm this size, especially when prices are nothing special. In this north-west corner of Northern Ireland we seem to have caught the edge of every passing low pressure system.

We seldom get two dry days in a row and even when it is not raining it is cloudy with little drying. A lot of straw, which is a valuable commodity here, is still to be baled, but we can’t get the weather to dry it.

Stubble ground at the moment is really too wet to work and so there will be a knock-on effect on getting next year’s crops drilled.

A year, I think, to forget and I have to admit my confidence and enthusiasm have taken a bit of a hit.  

On a brighter note, my wife and I visited Harper Adams University recently to see our daughter graduate with a first in bioveterinary science.

It was a really happy, fun day and a pleasure to meet so many confident and positive young people who have worked, and played, hard over the past few years.

They are the future for our industry and will have to face and solve the challenges of feeding a rapidly expanding population over the next 40 years, against a background of unreliable government support, overregulation and a very unbalanced supply chain. Best of luck to them all.

Robert Moore farms on the Molenan Estate in Northern Ireland, where his family have farmed for more than 200 years. He switched to arable production in the late 1990s, away from beef and sheep. He still has a small suckler herd on non-suitable arable land.