Richard Ward manages 445ha on the Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire borders of the Cotswolds, some of which is contract farmed. Crops grown are oilseed rape and wheat, some of which is grown for seed

Last Farmer Focus piece: December 2007

Notable changes: Naked oats and barley dropped because of blackgrass control.

Peas and beans have also been dropped due to insufficient margins.

We’ve been shifting wheat recently. Our first dry harvest since 2006 allowed us to fill the grainstore at below 15% moisture, but I’m frustrated to find it has risen by between 1 and 2%. Having cooled it to below 10C it seems in remarkably good condition. But yet again we are faced with the dilemma as to whether it is best to run it through our painfully slow mobile drier, or to take the claims on moisture.

Blowing frosty air through the heap will help. Provided that the air temperature is 5C or more below the temperature on the grain, you cannot make it wetter. Frosty air is usually dry air, so we can cool and dry at the same time.

Frost will also slow down the growth of our crops. Even the severe frosts we had a year ago didn’t seem to do any damage and may well have contributed to giving us our highest yields ever.

However, we all know that nature has a wonderful habit of evening things out. Many times the following year can give completely different results. This might come as some comfort to those less fortunate yield-wise in the eastern counties.

For years, I’ve been looking for a sensibly priced, mid-range combine with the gismos I want and not the over-complicated electrical stuff I don’t. It seems that manufacturers concentrate too much on ever bigger and wider machines, which many of us cannot use. My priorities are a 20ft vari-feed header, which I don’t have to take off every time I change fields and a machine that is as simple as possible to alter from oilseed rape to wheat or to beans. I also would like one that will self-adjust its sieves and wind to cope with our banks and slopes when driving both across and/or up and down them.

So my Christmas present this year is a New Holland CX6080, even though it is a conventional straw walker combine. Hopefully, it will perform as well as our previous semi-rotary TF combines. The vari-feed header should ensure that not just the straw from either side of the cutter-bar auger, but also that immediately ahead of the auger centre, will all hit the drum ear first, greatly increasing the efficiency of the whole of the rest of the combine. The demonstration machine seemed to prove my theory.

Hope you get what you wanted for Christmas too.

Catch up with former Farmer Focus writer Matthew Dale

Catch up with former Farmer Focus writer Peter Hogg

Catch up with former Farmer Focus writer Steve Bumstead