David's Digest

As the rain came down during the dullest, wettest and coldest August for seventeen years the frustrations of harvest were pretty extreme. You could see the deterioration in the grain and the straw as day followed day. And even now its over (or nearly) for most the barns are hardly bursting at the seams. In common with most of the country, according to information received, our yields are down 10% to 15%, some of it, I suspect, because of shelling out in the brisk winds of a week ago. So thank goodness for the higher prices that will apply to that portion of the crop we did not sell too early.

Despite the lower tonnage and the forward seeling it will be a fairly successful harvest financially. As always we farmers try to grow optimum yields but we make more money when output is short and prices are high - a paradox ruled by the laws of supply and demand. But we'll still try to grow big crops next year, of course.

As I write the last of the straw (that we did not chop behind the combine) is being brought into the Dutch barn for storage in big bales. Its not very pretty after all the rain but its all we've got and the animals that lie on it will have to manage as best they can. At least its dry and I don't suppose they'll be too concerned about the colour as long as there's no mould.

We don't grow winter rape these days so we're not concerned with making seedbeds from wet compacted soil. I sympathise with those who are struggling at such jobs at the moment for heavy clay land is coming up in wet lumps and if it isn't caught just right it will be a nightmare to cover the seed.

Its bad enough to have to deal with the ruts made by the corn trailers along headlands and the middle of fields as they carted the grain to the barn. The damage they've done is worse that that by the combine, I reckon. And if you put a sub-soiler into such areas at present all it would do is cut the clay like cheese.

So, although I hear of farm in the north and in Scotland (where they've had a rare and well deserved easy harvest this year) where winter wheat drilling is already well under way, I think we'll let things settle for a few days and delay the start of autumn grain drilling and hope the land dries so that we can once again travel on it without doing harm. And that suggests more faith in the weather than I really feel.

Many many years ago, when the BBC was in its infancy and the Archers just had a smallholding there was a radio programme - a very early soap opera I suppose you'd call it - on the Home Service every weekday afternoon entitled "Mrs Dale's Diary". Mrs Dale, was, for a while, played by the famous stage actress Jesse Matthews and her radio "husband" was a hard working doctor, Jim Dale.

One of the fictional Mrs Dale's catch phrases when speaking of her husbands work load was "I'm worried about Jim".

Well, I'm not worried about Jim - Paice - that is. He's taken to the job of Agriculture Minister like a duck to water. He did, of course, have a lot of experience with the brief, having been opposition spokesman on the subject for about five years. He therefore has the advantage of coming over like a man who knows his subject - a quality that has been notably absent in the last few politicians who have held the post, especially in the first few months of office.

Even better, and I am in danger of coming over all party political here, he's actually beginning to deliver some of the promises he made in opposition, despite the fact that they will prove unpopular in some quarters and will almost certainly cause him problems. I refer particularly to the consultation he's just announced on culling badgers, which is, of course, a political minefield. But he believes it is necessary and has taken the first steps towards introducing a cull next year. And cattle farmers all over the UK will thank him for it.