David's Digest

A week ago as I dragged my feet through mud while rain ran off my cap down the back of my neck I commented to a colleague that it would be two or three weeks before we would be able to get on the land. But suddenly it's Spring. The sun has shone for the last few days and yesterday and today temperature's here in Norfolk have been around 19 degrees C. Recently saturated dark brown land has whitened over and the air has filled with the sound of tractors preparing seed beds.
On this farm it so happens that most of our spring drillings of beans and sugar beet are scheduled for our heaviest and therefore slowest drying fields, so a bit of patience is called for to avoid compaction. But we've applied first top dressings of nitrogen onto the latest drilled fields of winter wheat and we've done the oil seed rape as well. If this weather holds we'll be spring seed drilling very shortly.
Oh, silly me. In my old fashioned habit of thinking about production agriculture, I nearly forgot. The environment is what they want us to look after most these days, isn't it? Thankfully I've always been a closet environmentalist so it's no hardship.
Anyway the buds are bursting, the birds are singing and the primroses on the banks are blooming. All seems well with the world. What a difference a week makes.