I’m beginning to sound like a stuck record, but continuous rainfall through March has made progress on field work almost impossible.

At time of writing we have completed 50% of our first nitrogen application. Although we haven’t been stuck, we’ve rutted the majority of our fields at some point.

It’s so demoralising making a mess, but with crops shedding tillers rather than adding them we need to try to give them a kick start.

See also: Farmer Focus: Struggling crops and no cereal grazing

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 cereals also need manganese as soon as we can travel – which is not looking imminent.

Spring germinating blackgrass is starting to make an appearance. As you’d expect its coming worst on some of our better wheat fields.

Herbicides ran out of steam months ago and the cold anaerobic clay soils offer perfect growing conditions for it.

Winter beans aren’t faring much better. Where crops have sat in waterlogged fields for months they are starting to die off. I guess they can only survive in these extreme conditions for so long.

Like the cereals, they are in desperate need of some trace elements, but this won’t be anytime soon.

It feels like every day the area of spring drilling is increasing and the window of opportunity is reducing.

We finally finished our 1,000m-plus hedge laying marathon. Dave and Josh have done a fantastic job, but like me I think they’ll be glad to see the back of it until next winter.

Thankfully, its kept everyone busy through this wet winter.

Workshop jobs are nearing completion. The new low disturbance subsoiler is completed and we’re just fabricating a frame on the rolls for a slug pelleter.

There’s virtually no rapeseed in the rotation, so I’m expecting legume fallows to increase their population.

Finally, I’d like to welcome Ronan to the team, we don’t have a very high turnover of staff so it’s always exciting to welcome a new member.

He is in his mid-twenties so the average age of the team is now lower… now there’s only three of us the wrong side of fifty!