Because of production and print times for magazines I have to write my columns for Farmers Weekly several days ahead of publication. Having written and sent off the piece for the latest edition, in which I moaned about lack of rain and the damage I feared it was doing, it rained quite a lot for a few days. In fact we had nearly 30mm over the course of about a week and I was beginning to think I'd made a fool of myself (again!).
For there is no doubt the rain perked up the sugar beet and the winter wheat no end and they now look reasonable, if a little late. But one of my biggest concerns was the spring oil seed rape, drilled after I was forced to pull up failed winter rape. We had tickled the top and drilled the spring crop fairly shallowly into moist soil. But as I feared the long dry spell that followed was too much for it to survive, especially on heavy land where the tilth was cobbly.
So, we now have about three quarters of the acreage of spring OSR that looks OK (always provided I can keep the ruddy pigeons from eating it - its almost a full time job) but the other quarter is gappy and thin and clearly will never make a full crop now. As I suspected when I wrote that FW piece the seeds must have germinated and then died for lack of moisture.
So, that's two partial crop failures on the same land in the same year. And its no consolation to me that other farmers of my acquaintance, in the fens and in north Norfolk have had even less rain than we have so have even greater crop failures than I have. I just hope the fact that I have applied to take our Single Farm Payment in Euro's this year helps to make up the loss.