I still feel a bit guilty complaining about lack of rain when I hear of the problems in Scotland and Ireland. In fact I had dinner with a farmer from south west Scotland the other evening who said his grassland was so wet he had been unable to mow second cut hay, despite a good crop.
But here in East Anglia, where we were quite content to enjoy mainly fine weather for the grain harvest, it has still not rained. All through August we had a total of about 12mm and there has been no measurable rainfall in September so far. After the wet July, land has dried like concrete and on those fields which were early ploughed in order to get ready for autumn drilling there are clods as big as horses heads and as hard as steel.
A few hardy souls have tried drilling wheat into such fields. We've even done a couple ourselves on kind land. But the seeds went into clods and dust and we wore a fair bit of steel off the cultivators and drill coulters as we forced a seedbed. We've given up for now in the hope of rain but there is no sign of it on the weather horizon.
This dry land is playing havoc with lifting potatoes - some are being irrigated first in the hope of reducing lifting damage. And although the first sugar beet factory - Wissington - opens tomorrow I can't believe many beet will be delivered. Getting them out of the ground in these conditions is liable to smash your harvester and leave half the roots broken in the soil.
So, frustrating times here in Norfolk. But I don't suppose we'll get much sympathy from the north.