Arable

arable farming

Our Arable farming covers about 1300 acres, of which the following crops are grown;

Feed Wheat
Feed barley
OSR
Oats
Maize
Spring Beans
Miscanthus ( Energy Crop)
Setaside

We use the maize, osr, and oats as a break to our first wheats. No 'second wheats' are grown as they are not viable financially.

Inputs are purchased as cheaply as possible, often as a group buy to get big savings together.

All produce is weighed over our weighbridge to give us accurate costings and gross margins.

All machinery operations are carried out by our own equipment and operators, but other contractors would be pulled in if we are busy and can't get to a job rather than mess up the timing of an operation.

The land is entered into the "entry level scheme" and we also have an extensive stewardship agreement running, which includes 6m margins around most headlands.

More info will be added to this page during the season.

November

Well, having had an ideal autumn and been able to keep drilling virtually every day, we have now had so much rain we are water logged. All the drilling is done though, and we are up to date with spraying and other field work. Most of the P& K has been applied to the autumn cereals and we are mnitoring slugs on the later drilled areas.

Staff are in a quiet time now with little to do other than maintenance on the buildings and machinery. We try and go through all machines in readiness for the next season.

Grain marketing is more interesting this year, with prices far more encouraging than previous years. While grain prices are up though we must not forget that so are fertiliser, fuel and labour costs to name but a few.