So Oliver Walston has announced that the mad summer weather has meant that he has been harvesting his wheat at 27.1% moisture in order to satisfy the early market.   What I wonder is how much diesel is being burnt in order to take 12% moisture out of this whaet? and is it genuinely possible (or advisable) to do such a thing in a continuous flow drier ? 

Are his neighbours disappearing under a cloud of steam emitted from his drier?

diesel = lots

combine = mess

silly = yes

I thought our neighbour was a bit mad to cut OSR at 16%!

Will wheat even thresh at 27.1????  I am gobsmacked. 

Its just a statement of "hahaha. i'm so rich i can stuff the drying costs. and hahaha i'm harvesting and you're not 'cos its wet" posing.

Sorry, you did great for beet. Dont make a twat of yourself now. You aint got so much it cant wait to dry up a bit.

id of thought youd be pluging up to combine every few minuts and genoraley making a mess of everything. But yere heas probubley saying F**k it im riche enought to be abal to afford to do it. 

Hi , Some of these early first week aug wheat trades were done at £190/ton feed.Maybe we are the daft idiots.He prob wishs he keep a bit of last years to cover some of the weather risk.But thats FARMING.

We are all mad to be farming.JOHN.

ha ha you guys make me laugh.

cutting wheat at 27% is commonplace in scotland.

My first harvest after college was 1985 which was all cut over 30% with dual wheels on combine, trailers and balers..We finished about 30th october. Fortuneately we had a drier. If you didnt have a drier, drying charges were £100/acre. Lots of people went bust.

Last time i cut wheat over 30% was 2004, when it all started to sprout in the ear.

Certain combines cant handle it, if they have a vertical unloading auger. You have to dry it in 2 trips through a continuous drier, or half loads in a tub drier. tub drier augers cant hande it, it has to be mixed with a batch of drier stuff.

You might say the risk is not worth it, but scotland held the world yeild record of 5.6 tons /acre till last year.

When wheat gets well into the 30s it takes ages to empty the combine tank and you darent leave it in the tank overnight.It has to be dug out in the morning.Trailers have to be nearly vertical to tip.Ive found the best way to fill a mobile drier is to leave say a ton of dry wheat in the bottom and then tip wet wheat in over the sides and leaving the burner on during the filling.The first 10% of moisture steams off fairly quickly.I reckon youll use less fuel drying dead ripe wheat that is soaking than drying wheat that is ,say 22% because it isnt ripe.

 

Even at today's fuel costs half of my drying costs come from having the damn thing siting in the shed. 27 % seems excessive but if you've got it, you might as well use it.

Everyone knocks Oliver, but he's still farming!! Anyone who is still in the business after the last dacde must be getting quite a lot reasonably right.

farmideas:

Anyone who is still in the business after the last dacde must be getting quite a lot reasonably right.

If you inherit your land, or have it paid for, then you have to be a pretty crap farmer (arable) to have gone to the wall. I dont know how OW got his farm, but I think your statement cant surely apply to chaps whos daddies pass them a free 3000acres.

TeslaCoils:

farmideas:

Anyone who is still in the business after the last dacde must be getting quite a lot reasonably right.

If you inherit your land, or have it paid for, then you have to be a pretty crap farmer (arable) to have gone to the wall. I dont know how OW got his farm, but I think your statement cant surely apply to chaps whos daddies pass them a free 3000acres.

My point is that this past decade has not been the easiest for many farmers, irrespective of the size of operation or how they came to be farming in the first place. Farmers of all sizes have thrown in the towel over the past 10 years. This doesn't necessarily mean they have gone bust, or 'gone to the wall'. Giving up farming is done for a whole host of reasons, not simply bankruptcy. Large farmers who inherited their land have pulled out over this past decade, because they found it was not giving them the rewards they want. But OW hasn't, even though he seems pretty mad to be drying 27% wheat. I'm sure he has had plenty of opportunities to move on and focus on other things, and live comfortably off the interest. But he's stuck with it, like yourself and many others, and I take my hat off to you all. I have a neighbour who is also harvesting at high moisture levels, because the grain's been sold and has to be delivered.

I don't know Tesla, we have seen a few guys right in our community who inherited money you couldn't have hauled away in two dump trucks, and they still went broke, but your point is very good, it is alot easier to be a great success if you start with a million or two. Do they have the saying in the UK, "I have made a small fortune farming, the only trouble is I started with a large fortune."??

An old boy told me that there were three sure-fire ways to loose money - slow horses, fast women and farming. Horses is easiest, women is nicest but farming is just certain.

My point was maybe more relevant to the last 20 years of heavily subsidised UK farming - if you owned your land I just cant see how you could go bust, except due to factors outside your business.

Did your spell of rotten weather abate Kansas?

with the weather the way it is waying up cost of drying it compared to losses

i'm hopping to start cutting my wheat tomorrow it's at 24% today but it's started to grow on the plant so needs to come off before it starts to rain again

Looking at the forcast now i wish i had sold and dryed wheat in first week AUGUST.

We are still Drying it and there is less of it then there was in early AUGUST.

And then theres the cash flow.

Olli gets some things right!!!!!

JOHN.

TC, it may be difficuilt to go bust if you own the farm, but there are plenty of examples.

The only thing that has kept most of my neighbours afloat the last 10 yrs is cottage rents and steading developments. Rising land values has kept the bank at bay as they rack up £100 k losses annually.

The danger point comes when the £1m overdraft secured against £3m farm looks dicey when land values halve, as happened in 1986.(interest rate  22%)

As to Walston, he should be strung up for going on tv in 1996  and complaining he got too much subsidy.

Tesla: It has been a strange August to be sure.  Very cool, only 3 days so far in the 90s, most in the low to mid 80s. Heavy dew and often fog and mist every morning.  The dew often stays on until noon, or even a little later in the shade.  Poor weather for haymaking, but good for growing crops.  We now need a rain, although I wouldn't say we are desperate.  The soybeans being late need a rain or perhaps 2 more to finish them, along with a late frost.  The prognosticators are blowing about a frost the 15th of September, that will really knock us down a couple of notches, I am hoping since they can't forecast a day ahead and be right that they are full of beans on this one. 

I agree it has been very strange. Since mid May I dont think we have had a day without cloud - the cloud cover has be near constant. Agree thay crop growing has been incredible with record yields for wheat being recorded daily, although I dont hear many brilliant winter barleys. Hay almost a universal disaster with lots going to be used for bedding. Out of 30ac, 20 poor to average and i'd say 5 brilliant.

Weather for September now been given as "unsettled". I view this as rain and will be drilling as soon as I dare. Wheat that is.

To Glasshouse:

1985 harvest is etched forever in my memory for all the wrong reasons. It was my final one as a farm manager - for a new non-farming owner who, although he didn't say so, I always felt wondered why we couldn't repeat the bumper results of 1984 under my previous employer.

We had a field of Panda barley so flat on soil so wet that we had to put a mower through first to fluff it up enough to get it in the combine. When we tried to use the pick-up reel it gathered more mud than grain.

The knock-on effect with the wet weather continuing right through that autumn was that our wheat drilling, as I recall with Galahad sown last, continued right into early November. It was then, when my employer stopped my two man team from sowing in order to clear up a Nov 5 bonfire, that I realised our priorities were clearly not the same.

he'll be sat at home laughing his tits off now! While the rest of us are drowning in wet grain fair play to him i say. Wish I'd had his foresight!

Not so sure I agree. We all take risks and chance things, so yes maybe I should have cut more at 18%, but 27% is not practical for a lot of us - central stores will send it back and it would be 3 times through our drier to get it down to 14.5%. Hindsight a wonderful thing, but wheat in the field can dry with some nice weather and a change in rotation is not a big problem now the rape doesnt look like it will be sown.

 

I'm not suggesting we should all follow suit but I think if he took a chance and went against the general consensus and it paid off for him then I don't think anyone should really critisize that.  Since last september agronomists have said give it all you've got, look after your crops more than ever with current prices, wheat crops are looking promising and yet at the last hurdle farmers question costs and cross their fingers hoping for a belting august!? I appreciate there's no sense in wasting energy but if your crops ready, the price is right, its yeilding well and the sun is shining then what the hell are you waiting round for? Another pair of aces? 

 There's an old saying "a bird in the hand..." 

Given the current weather here it's encouraging to know wheat'll combine at that! 

 

Indeed. Its worth nowt until its in the shed. Thing is that a lot of us were combining when we could, even at high percentages, but no-one was waiting for a belter. In many cases we were waiting to be able to travel and consequently got about 7 cutting days this year.