Building on from the themes of my last column, we seem to have got to the end of summer without having a summer.

Normally in a wet harvest we would expect to catch a break in the pattern at some point, but not so this year.

Our harvest has been difficult and drawn out, and yields of flowering crop are disappointing right across Canterbury.

See also: Long-term spring OSR grower reveals his approach

About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

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We still have our carrots to do at the end of April, so are hopeful for that crop.

What we can look on positively is that each day that we got going, we had a great run, the combine went well and we never missed an opportunity. We simply had too few dry days.

A year like this just shows how vital our mixed system is, and we will be leaning heavily on the livestock and good returns from lamb finishing to fill in the potholes left from the harvest.

Two years ago we had a cracking harvest and got caught in a collapse in lamb market returns.

As I write this, president Trump and China are still facing off over tariffs. 

Our biggest industry is dairying, our biggest dairy customer is China, and in turn China’s largest export market is the US, which has effectively announced a doubling of the price of all Chinese goods for US consumers.

None of that conjures up the prospect of market confidence.

I’m not sure how all this will play out, but it is looking very reminiscent of pistols at dawn on a foggy morning.

As an arable industry, we are intrinsically linked with the fortunes of the dairy industry for markets for our grains and forages, and with the greater international agricultural market for pricing and demand for our seed crops.

My mindset here at the moment is to concentrate on the basics of making the farm perform while putting on hold all non-essential development, maintenance and capital replacement plans until we see the fog lift.