Well, I walked around the Cereals event and decided everything was too expensive. It must be an age thing. In reality though, I do question the justification of price increases.

Gross margins will be under huge pressure this year and manufacturers of inputs are quite happily putting 5% on products as a minimum, with the onslaught of blackgrass and disease pressure.

My number crunching doesn’t make very exciting reading – the new Range Rover Holland and Holland order is on hold until better times are on the horizon.

I recently had a very interesting visit to the Agrii smart farm at Stow Longa. I always try to make an effort to go because its ongoing blackgrass trials are very well run.

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Colin Lloyd showed us some fascinating insights on cultivation techniques and drilling dates in a matrix that has been running since 2010. The take-home message for me was that high-quality ploughing in good conditions once every five or six years was a good starting point.

Most of our land here has never been ploughed. It came out of grass with the use of discs and a CAT D8 crawler in the 1970s and early 1980s, in fact. I’m not sure some of it would plough – we’ll have to see.

The other take-home message was delayed drilling also had a massive effect on blackgrass numbers. Delaying drilling until October or even November is somewhat scary on this heavy clay, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It seems we are going to grow beans again at Belvoir. Looking back at the records it’s about 10 years since they were last grown here, with mixed results.

Our renewal of ELS in 2012 means to get 5% of our area into ecological focus areas we have little choice but to grow a crop we don’t really want to grow and one that will no doubt be going into an oversupplied market. Don’t you just love democracy and freedom of choice?

Keith Challen manages 800ha of heavy clay soils in the Vale of Belvoir, Leicestershire, for Belvoir Fruit Farms. Cropping includes wheat, oilseed rape and elderflowers. The farm is also home to the Belvoir Fruit Farms drinks business.