Farmer focus: An autumn to lift the spirits
© Phil Weedon Apologies should be handed out sparingly, which is why I’m not about to row back on what I said in my previous piece about the prevailing pessimism in the farming community.
It is, however, hard not to feel upbeat about the conditions we’ve been blessed with this autumn.
See also: Why vegetables are making a return to Kent arable farm
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Although it has been dry, we were able to half-work our winter wheat fields to a false seedbed, retaining the moisture from any shower we did have.
This delivered a decent flush of weeds before a final cultivation pass ahead of sowing.
Gritting our teeth in the face of perfect conditions, we delayed sowing our bean and wheat bicrop until the middle of October.
The aim was to lessen the risk of the beans becoming too proud or diseased before winter.
We were rewarded with 15mm of rain to help their seed-beds and managed to get them all tucked in the evening before storm Benjamin arrived, bringing a further 22mm of rain.
An early harvest meant all of our cover crops went in two weeks earlier than usual and are at present up to my waist.
It’s reassuring to see that establishing them was money well spent, both for nature and our soils.
It literally doesn’t get any better than that.
Away from the farm, Alice and I were hugely honoured to be invited to the National Harvest Festival at Westminster Abbey. It was a joy to be among so many familiar farming friends.
An autumn like this is nature’s way of persuading us to do it all over again. Henry Birtles captured that spirit in his poem The Harvest, read at the service:
Ask farming people what it’s like and though the job is one they chose
It takes its toll; the troughs are long and cold and deep
The flattened barley, missing sheep and so much more that blights their show
But on and on and on they go, until that day of days has come
The tractor’s parked, the combine’s quiet; the crop is in, the Harvest done.
We can’t help ourselves.
