Well, the weather doesn’t seem to get any better. Spring drilling started on 11 April and finished on the 15, with a little over 80ha of the planned 220ha drilled.

Conditions were poor, and history has proven on these clays that anything drilled in cold, wet conditions after mid-April is almost always a loss-making exercise that leads to a late harvest.

The 80ha of spring barley and spring wheat is already being hammered by crows, pigeons and slugs.

See also: Farmer Focus: A few false starts to spring drilling

About the author

Keith Challen

Arable Farmer Focus writer

Keith Challen manages 1,200ha of heavy clay soils in the Vale of Belvoir, Leicestershire, for Belvoir Farming Company. Cropping includes wheat, oilseed rape and elderflowers. The farm is also home to the Belvoir Fruit Farms drinks business.

Read more articles by Keith Challen

The good news is that our recently purchased Horsch Avatar drill did a near-perfect job of putting seed in the ground, covering it up and firming the soil where there was virtually no tilth.

It also did a brilliant job of drilling into my cover crop of blackgrass, wild oats, brome, groundsel and cranes bill.

This gives me confidence that we can cope with drilling into proper cover crops.

This month’s crop review is really quite straightforward – the whole farm looks rubbish.

The cereals that survived the constant battering from rain have poor roots and tissue analysis shows deficiencies in all trace elements.

Beans that didn’t “drown” are now suffering from a huge flush of freshly germinating blackgrass. When will it end?

Have you ever lost your phone? Well whilst composting manure I managed to drop mine, scoop it up with the loading shovel, tip it into the muck spreader and then spread it amongst 500t of compost.

Needless to say, it couldn’t be found and certainly wasn’t working. It took a full 10 days to get a new one, with both internal politics and the inability of the courier to find the farm.

What a truly invigorating 10 days. First, it was the sheer panic. How will people contact me?

How will I cope with not being able to look at the weather apps every 10 minutes? How can I track the children or order my cappuccino?

After 24 hours of frustration it became quite liberating and the piece and quiet was bliss.

It was almost a shame to turn the new one on.