ROSEMARY'S FARMING DIARY | FARM FOCUS
Rosemary’s FARMING Diary As you will see from the picture overleaf…we go into 2021 with much the same difficulties which we encountered in 2020 with ground conditions becoming worse by the day, flooding in some areas caused by the relentless rainfall and snow. As you can see from the picture we have had to put in extra ditches to help clear the lying water from the fields.
All the sugar beet remaining in the ground was lifted the first week in January, our haulier cleared the last load of sugar beet and delivered to the factory on Friday 22 January. No records this year, but acceptable returns considering the varied weather the crops have had to tolerate in 2020. Sugar beet responds to water, but also needs the sun (all in the critical growing season which we didn’t get in 2020). The cereal crops are starting to green up and move forward although as the winter has been reasonably ‘open’ until this week all autumn sowings were growing well. We have been pleased with the growth our oil seed rape crop made this year, so far so good, we were able to sow it earlier than usual and the crop got a way to a good start with some rainfall soon after sowing which made a significant difference. We now have the pigeons making themselves a nuisance – they can and will do a lot of damage if no deterrent is
used. We are told nationally the area planted with oil seed rape is down approximately 18% so we could well be importing oil seed rape into the country this year, obviously the better the yield that can be achieved from our own crop grown here in this country, the better it is for us and the environment with lower air miles. Commodity prices of cereals and oil seed rape have increased over the last two months which has been very welcome. This will to a certain extent help towards the lower yield most of us experienced last harvest, again mainly due to poor weather conditions - This is farming. Farming is a gamble, it is the weather that always holds the ace of spades, followed closely by the politicians and then of course we are still awaiting the outcome of Brexit, no clear guidance has been made available, just snippets of information. Farmers need assurance to help plan the way
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