Farmer Focus: Farm looking ‘awful’ after relentless rain
Keith Challen © TIm Scrivener It’s my first day back at work after four days at Agritechnica and a week of winter sun in the Canaries, and I’m greeted with 28mm of rain.
The farm can only be described as looking awful. There isn’t a single field that has not been affected by the sheer volume of rain.
Fields that have been mole ploughed and subsoiled don’t look any different to those that haven’t, and to make matters worse, we are now entering into a period of frost.
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Waterlogged fields usually heave shearing roots, and although it’s a long way to harvest, experience tells me its not going to be a bumper one next year.
On a more positive note, Agritechnica was fantastic.
Years ago, I would have been dazzled by the sheer size of the machinery on show. Now I’m getting older I just mumble about the price and who’s buying it all, but nonetheless, it’s impressive.
Ironically, the things that caught my eye were on the smaller side. DJI had a modular drone, capable of both spraying and spreading with what seemed like a 30-second changeover time.
Bayer had some green-on-green camera technology, which will be very exciting in the future.
I can see myself now, sitting in the armchair, watching Wardy’s waffle or Olly blogs on YouTube, while a fleet of drones are patch spraying weeds with zero compaction. It can’t come soon enough.
With the past two months being particularly wet, the team have started some workshop projects.
First is a low-disturbance subsoiler project. As usual, it will be overbuilt to cope with the heavy land, with off-the-shelf soil engagement parts, and then some modifications to our tramline leveller.
I can see it’s going to get some use next autumn. The final project revolves around a Law Denis seed cleaner we’ve just bought, with a view to only sowing the boldest of home-saved seed.
