It was inevitable the dry weather wouldn’t last forever.

We had 70mm over a four-day period and, to be fair, it was very welcome – we had finished drilling and just managed to get the pre-emergence herbicides on before the rain, so for once everything seemed to go to plan.

See also: Farmer Focus: Double-drilling success to control blackgrass

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

Early-drilled wheats have had a herbicide top up and are looking blackgrass-free. So far, the new herbicide from BASF looks to be doing a good job.

Winter beans are looking good and enjoying the mild temperatures. Having been drilled into seed-beds with minimal moisture, they have pushed down a fair root system already.

We found in our own trials last year that the earlier-drilled crops coped better with the drought, especially those given the Unium Exseed dressing.

Every year we have a review of the summer and autumn. This involves the team sitting down while things are still fresh in everyone’s mind and discussing all operations and machines used.

Harvesting went well with virtually no downtime at all.

The Fendt Ideal 10T combine hardly missed a beat all summer, with some fairly impressive outputs according to the daily weighbridge figures – a great success.

The same has to be said of the carting team – even the cultivating team had a good run with only teething problems with the Quadtrac.

However, the warranty has now lapsed and I’m nervous about having such an expensive machine without ring-fenced costs, so its future is under review.

With this in mind we’ve tried the Fendt 1050 to see if it’s capable of undertaking the Quadtrac’s duties.

I have to say, not only could it pull both the 12m cultivator and subsoiler, it could pull them faster than we needed to go with same fuel use as the Quadtrac.

Definitely food for thought, so watch this space.

Last winter we planted some elderflowers in clay on raised beds, much like a potato bed, to prevent them from becoming waterlogged in the winter.

This has been so successful that it finally looks like we have a method of growing them on clay. It finally feels like it’s all coming together.