It’s all in the planning. Harvest will start with barley, then into the oilseed rape and finish off with the wheat. Far too straight forward. The rapeseed has decided it wanted harvesting first, and, as it’s worth the most, that is what has happened.

The barley was turning very quickly, but has been overtaken by the oilseed rape.

If the weather forecast is right we will have been combining for a week, which gives us a two-week head start on previous years. No visit to the CLA Game Fair this year.

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Earlier harvest gives clear benefits in terms of cultivation timings and hopefully a good flush of weeds and volunteers that can be taken out prior to the planting of the next crop.

With the seed bank being fairly full this year stale seed-beds are going to be essential.

There certainly seems to have been a more proactive approach this year to taking out wheat crops with bad blackgrass problems either with glyphosate or in some cases whole cropping for AD plants. There will still be a lot though that were left.

Come the autumn it will be interesting to see different planting strategies and if some do hold off and delay drilling or in the worst cases have already planned for spring cropping.

We will do a mixture of both as I do not want to spray wheat off again.

At long last we seem to have the final details of what “greening” will actually mean on a practical level. These details should have been available a long time ago to allow for proper planning within businesses to take place.

We are lucky as the main farm is in a HLS agreement and two contract farms are in ELS agreements pre-dating January 2012.

For those not in this position there is a lot to do especially if you wish to include hedgerows as part of your greening measures.

As always let’s hope we have a straightforward and safe harvest and we go a long way to rectifying many of the problems caused by the past two years.

Jon Parker manages 1,500ha near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, on a medium to heavy land for Ragley Home Farms, predominantly arable growing wheat, oilseed rape, and salad onions. There is also a beef-fattening unit and sheep flock