It is amazing how self-isolation has become the new normal. 

Due to the awful coronavirus, we are protecting ourselves as a farm team, and with the prospect of 800ha of spring sowing to be done, we have all taken the situation very seriously, as we can’t afford for anyone to be ill.

Our safely distanced morning meeting is punctuated with an update on the latest advice from the government to keep us safe, as well as a round table of anything to declare on the home front that could compromise our own, as well as our individual family members’ health. Not that there are many hours in the day for doing anything else but farm work.

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The weather has been on its absolute best behaviour, and with all meetings cancelled, my diary has allowed me to be on a second cultivator full-time to help keep ahead of our two Cameleons. As I write, we are pretty much halfway through the drilling campaign, with variable seed-bed conditions, depending on what primary cultivation went before.

Poor drainage areas in the occasional field are throwing up the odd wet spot, which means we have to be on our metal with a little hydraulic feathering on cultivation depth when feeling the field slip from beneath you.

But in general, I have been amazed, after the winter we have had, at just how well things have gone.

Although face-to-face meetings have been abandoned, I have participated in several conference calls from the tractor cab, so we are still conducting off-farm business. 

This dreadful virus has forced us to be extremely inventive in the way we continue to run our business, which has proved to be a liberating positive in potentially restrictive negative days. 

Keep healthy and safe.