It’s true – apart from the price of cereals, the other thing farmers moan about most is the weather.

First it’s too wet all winter to even consider getting onto the land and now, dare I say, we could really do with a steady spell of rain. All the spring drilling is now complete. The last to go in was 16ha of spring rape, which is yet to emerge and is probably most in need of a good drink to get it moving.

I’m now on a seemingly endless merry-go-round over the farm with the sprayer, either with chemical or liquid fertiliser. The winter barley should be done now, apart from a T2 fungicide. It has had 138kg/ha of nitrogen – slightly more than usual. The wheat and winter rape have had the same so far but they will get a final 62kg in a week or so to take them through to harvest.

Last year I experimented with the winter rape at pod-filling stage by spraying about 38kg of nitrogen onto alternate tramlines in a couple of fields. You could see the crop was a darker green where the nitrogen had been applied, but when it came to combining I couldn’t detect any difference in quantity so we shall not be bothering this year.

About 20ha of wheat has been sprayed with 0.4kg of Pacifica (iodosulfuron + mesosulfuron) to deal with black grass. The rest has had Broadway Star (pyroxsulam + florsulam) for a general clean up; I intend to go back with a T1 and growth regulator mix in another week.

On 7 May we could all be waking up to a new government. Whether it will be a different one or a mixture of them remains to be seen at the time of writing, but all we can hope for is one that is sympathetic to the farming industry and the countryside and concerned for our food security.

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