From LEAF Farmer Duncan Farrington
October Newsletter
This is beyond a joke,
as harvest continues to linger on with great frustration and expense. It has been the 5th wettest summer on record, but the rain alone we can cope with, where as the continual dull cloudy days of high humidity between the rain making it the dullest August on record were a problem. The result being that the crops never dried to the moisture contents required to be able to market them.
All in all it’s the wettest harvest I have known which goes back over twenty years. Out of all the wheat we have so far harvested, only one trailer load was at the required 15% moisture content. We now have a barn full of wet grain, with an estimated 20,000 litres of water to be removed through our grain drier, which basically acts like an enormous hair dryer blowing hot air to dry the grain. It is powered by diesel and electricity, neither of which are cheap as we all know.
During August we kept harvesting steadily waiting for the forecast hot, dry weather. It didn’t arrive, and as August turned to September it just got wetter, so much so that our combine harvester has not moved in over two weeks, sitting in the middle of a wet field of wheat. We currently have around 3 days harvesting left to do, it is just a matter of when we will get to do it. Now however the ground is so wet, we can not cultivate the soil to prepare for the following crops which need planting in the next few weeks. As for the remaining wheat, these fields should by now be planted with rapeseed, to give them any chance of growing healthily. Alas there is nothing anyone can do about this, we are all fed up, and resigned to the conditions. But we are all in the same boat, and farming neighbours are all helping each other where we can. We have borrowed trailers to help us store more wet grain; whilst we have been planting rapeseed for neighbours where other machines couldn’t cope. Others who have finished combining are now helping harvest in appalling conditions just to try and catch up. We may be fed up, but it is great to see everyone helping one another.
The farming press shows pictures of fields under water with livestock and combine harvesters stranded in them, or bogged down in thick mud. They tell stories of huge piles of wet grain sitting outside in the rain, rather than going rotten in the fields. In Cornwall alone, an estimated £50 million has been lost due to crop damage, and the same again to the vital tourist industry in the county.
