Farmer fears worst for spring barley after deluge
© CJB Parr & Sons A Lincolnshire arable farmer and contractor faces an anxious wait to see if his newly drilled crop of spring barley has survived an April deluge.
Malcolm Parr, director of CJ & B Parr & Sons, checked the weather forecast and found 6-8mm of rainfall was expected over the weekend, so he drilled 30ha (75 acres) of Laurette spring barley in three fields as a “last-chance saloon”.
But the farm received almost 30mm on Sunday 28 April, which left two out of the three fields with extensive flooding and standing water up to 0.3m high in places.
See also: Further wet weather raises fears of harvest catastrophe
“We only drilled the spring barley crop on Friday [26 April], but the torrential downpour on Sunday basically swamped all the fields, ditches and the drains,” Mr Parr told Farmers Weekly.
“It just backed up and overtopped. We didn’t expect we were going to get nearer 30mm.”
He spent most of Monday 29 April digging trenches to attempt to remove the floodwater from the fields and into the drains after the water levels in them had fallen.
© CJB Parr & Sons
A day of letting water off land where the main drain had overtopped . pic.twitter.com/zV3YTie0jF
— Malc Parr 🇬🇧 (@tractorman07) April 29, 2024
“If we had been able to get the crop in a couple of days earlier and it had been chitted, we would have stood a chance, but now I’m really not sure,” he said. “It’s also getting too late to redrill it now.”
Sir Nicholas Bacon owns the 182ha farm at Wharton, near Pilham, and Mr Parr farms the land under a share farming agreement. He says it is the third time these fields have flooded since the winter.
Mr Parr believes the fields flood regularly mainly because the rainwater cannot get away downstream quickly enough to the River Trent. He plans to raise the issue with his local internal drainage board.
“It basically backs up and overtops on our land,” he explained.
© CJB Parr & Sons
Wheat crop lost
In total, 138ha of spring barley has been drilled on the farm and most of the remaining area will be sown with wild bird seed mixes under the Sustainable Farming Incentive.
Last autumn, 121ha of winter wheat drilled at this farm and another he manages at Corringham had to be written off after the ground was too wet and most of the seed rotted.