Harvest is back underway today (3 September) at Turnhouse Farm, Edinburgh, where Sandy Allison hopes to make some good progress in winter wheat.

With the combine having been at a standstill for 10 days, Mr Allison was eager to get on, as he had 200ha of winter wheat still to cut.

“Up until 1 September, we’ve had 761mm of rain this year; 128mm of that was in August and 201mm in July.”

With such a large amount of rain, ground conditions were sticky, with neighbouring farmers having machines sink in and plenty of  damage caused to soil structure.

“Our saving grace is that we don’t plough and we have a tracked combine. Without that I think we’d have had some problems,” he added.

So far Mr Allison had cut 30ha of rapeseed, a lower acreage than normal due to wet conditions last summer.

“Rapeseed averaged about 3t/ha, all of which was down to Cracker due to our club root problem.

“We’ve also got 150ha of spring beans to cut too, although they’ll not be cut this month due to the amount of green still in them.”

Mr Allison hoped to get some of his second wheat cut today, although he was concerned about quality.

“Some of the second wheats look fairly pinched, and we’ll start cutting those today.

“Later sown second wheats won’t be ready until the end of the week,  but they look a bit better, so hopefully in a weeks time I will have something better to report,” he said.

Unfortunately, the beans did not look as promising.

“I think we might have a pollination problem with the beans, but we’ll not know until we start cutting.”

Crop: Oilseed rape
Variety: Cracker
Area: 30ha
Yield: 3t/ha