Firstly, apologies, I failed miserably in getting my last two Farm Gate reports completed. I would love to say this was due to me being far too busy on the land, unfortunately this was not the case.

We have continued with ditch maintenance over the winter but have not really completed quite as much as I had first planned. As mentioned in previous reports, properly functioning ditches and drains are the cornerstone of growing crops on heavy land. Most of the land we work across has an underground drainage system that was mainly installed in the 1970s with small amounts of work carried out ever since. We did put a compete new scheme in across 35 ha last autumn at great expense, the speed at which water leaves this area is noticeably better than other areas, consequently we shall be spending more on drainage over the next few years.

We did have a brief period when we could get back onto the land in January for a few days by utilizing some frosty days. During this period, we drilled 100 ha of winter beans (3 months late) which are now well emerged and looking full of potential, we managed to get fertiliser applied to all wheat and barley crops and patched up some of the thinner patches of wheat.

Today all cereal crops have received 120 – 130 kg of Nitrogen largely in the form of Urea, the first dose appears to of been utilised by the crop and hopefully with some warmer days to come soon the second dose will also continue to build crop biomass. We will aim to have all Nitrogen applied to the winter cereals before the end of March other than a late top up for milling wheat to boost protein.



We have 560 ha of crops to establish this spring, a mixture of barley, oats, peas and sugar beet, we drilled 20 ha of low input barley on some sand on Friday 8^th March as part of a stewardship scheme, unfortunately with the rain lashing down again today any further drilling looks a long way off. Now I am not terribly concerned that most spring crops remain in the bag, however I will be if we don’t start drilling until April. We have entered the Sustainable Farming Incentive on our own farm and will be developing this further over the next 2 months with added options, we are also doing the same on contract farms. At the moment we have removed very little land from production although I am hearing of very large areas going into stewardship agreements, the recent wet autumn, wetter spring and low commodity prices will very likely see a different landscape in the coming months and years.