Farmer Focus: Crops benefit from cold weather snap
Richard Harris © Emily Fleur With the nice cold snap behind us, crops seem to look a little perkier and much better for it. The cold weather has hardened them and knocked disease back.
I also think it helps with manganese deficiency as I’m sure manganese hungry areas look better after a frost.
Both our first and second wheats have established well and tillered evenly. Yield potential looks much improved compared with 12 months ago.
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All of 2025’s grain was sold at harvest, so we have no grain store bugs to worry about and I don’t need to follow the market particularly tightly.
From what I have seen, it’s not done much since, so we’re happy we got it all gone when we did.
There’s only the round bale straw to move, which is starting to go to our local customers load by load. This will bring in some cashflow throughout the spring, which will be very useful.
The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) and Mid Tier payments are a nice surprise when they appear in the account.
Farming is very quiet at the moment so we are fully invested in finishing the farmhouse renovation, which is now at the second-fix stage and starting to look like a house once again.
We’ve unearthed some beautiful stone fire places, feature walls, timber trusses, flagstone floors and Victorian tiles, most of which has been covered up by previous generations to keep the cold and damp out.
Funny how fashion comes back around and here we are uncovering them all once again.
Let’s hope that modern-day building techniques can keep back that cold and damp or we’ll have a rather large heating bill on our hands.
There are a few more months of graft left (probably more than we think), as previous experience tells us there is a big difference between it being liveable and lettable.
We are aiming to do holiday lets in the late spring so it has all got to be snag free and flowing nicely before opening. Â