One of our fwispace regular users TeslaCoils has challenged us on the selection of FW's barometer farmers. He asked: "Do you vet your barometer farms? They seem never to have any problems and always have the best yields for the least effort. Either that or they are liars"
Well, they are certainly not liars. I'm not sure whether TeslaCoils has been reading enough of our barometer farm reports. The are all vetted before being offered barometer farm status and there's no doubt that they do have their share of problems and frustrations.
Take a look at the tale of woe from barometer farmer Ian Bird at Catchgate Farm, Castle Eden near Hartlepool and you'll see what I mean. The piece is also written up on page 50 of FW's September 5 issue. The poor guy has not only had the worst harvest he's ever known but has had to battle with a combine breakdown at the same time. Previous harvest spotlights may well have been more upbeat because two weeks ago and before we were not in the dire situation we are now with the weather.
The criteria we use for choosing barometer farms is tough. Firstly, they all have to be good farmers who have either been recommended to us by others in the industry or who have passed the Andrew Blake test. Andrew is our very experienced senior arable reporter who runs this section of content. He sets extremely high standard and he's a hard man to please.
Barometer farmers have to be business minded and prepared to give us their time to update readers and users on what's going on with their farm. We need an honest account - warts and all. It would completely defeat the whole object of having barometer farms if they always reported a perfect picture of life on the farm and consistently came up smelling of roses. What would be the point of that? In order to do a fair job for readers, they also have to represent a cross section of arable farms in size, location and focus. Overall, they should epitomise best practice in agriculture.
So it's not that surprising then that our barometer farmers are sounding like they've coped pretty well with this awful weather. We would have expected them to have found solutions to the problems. Our overall impression of this very difficult harvest is that it is impossible to generalise. Different parts of the country have had different experiences with the weather. Yields generally have been good for those suffering less with constant rain. I've just had a conversation with our columnist Stephen Carr who is based in East Sussex. He tells me that the micro climate in the south east has led to huge variations for farmers just down the road from each other. From parish to parish, there have been big differences in the way farms and farmers are coping.
Some of the harvest success stories are not just down to the weather. Good judgement calls on when to cut and making sure you have enough capacity to cut it all must have a lot to do with it as well. Some farmers in the south east, for example, have had years of relying on three dry weeks to cut and have organised their combine capacity around that. This year, with the weather so unreliable, two weeks of cutting was all they really had to work with. In East Sussex, there are still acres and acres looking untouched and very sad. It's a disaster for many.