Farmer blogs give taste of farming across the UK…and beyond
The farmer-written blogs are a great way to keep up with what people are doing on their farms – and you can add your own comments by clicking on the link at the bottom.
Here are some extracts to give you a flavour:
“It has been a long hard week for me – slow and frustrating, but productive when the weather let me. We are still trying to drill parsnips but with the wet weather this is proving almost impossible. To get brownie points I suggested work lights (our precision drill is hard to work with at night as you just can’t see anything of the 24 units at work so you could be drilling nothing before you know it) and so on Tuesday we spent the day wiring up six lights. The result is perfect night vision and so Thursday and Friday I managed to drill 71 acres, drilling at 5in spacings. It does not sound much, but you drill at 3.2kph so I was pleased. Saturday all I got done was one acre because of the rain and snow.”
“We still think that the soil is too cold to start planting potatoes so we have started cultivating land ready to plant some flowers. My first job this morning was escort driver. Look at the flashing beacon on the top of the Freelander. I had to escort the power harrow to St Lamberts because it is quite a wide implement. It’s important to always put on a bit of a show for the neighbours and I love driving with a flashing beacon the roof.”
“The weather radio went off several times again last night, prompting me to start a late night blog as I stayed awake looking at the approaching storm on the computer. The job of a storm spotter in our community is two-fold, first to be an on-the-ground source of information that the Sheriff dispatcher supposedly relays to the National Weather Service to help them decide what warnings need to be issued. Our most pressing job is it is our observations that lead us to decide if we will set off the tornado sirens for our community. It is quite a low tech procedure, we watch, and one or two guys sit in the firebarn watching the computer and listening to us and should we make the call to set off the sirens they are to pull the lever and take cover. Spotting at night is quite hard and dangerous, luckily most severe storms happen during the heat of the day and not at night. Last night was a hail and wind event – ended up getting about 1in-pea sized hail making the roads nearly impassible.”
“T0 is on, as is the last slug of nitrogen on the rape. A good thing as flowers are opening and the tractor was already chopping a few heads off on the way through. Got 100kg or urea on the first wheat after beans which should keep them in good stead until it warms up. It doesn’t seem right that we are going from 16C one day, then to biting winds, hail and sleet the next. The beet land has been moved but the drill is in the shed and it looks like it is going to stay there for a while. It’s not the weather for putting up rabbit netting. It isn’t the weather for sheep to be turned out, but the shed is packed with more lambs that were expected, so the first batch have gone into the newly fenced grass. At least laying the hedges means that they can be seen by people going past.”
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