The clocks have changed which on the farm signals the fact that most of the autumn work should be done and we are working shorter days.

The autumn drilling programme was easier this year with kinder weather but more difficult, personally, due to the various things I’m trying out, I make my life unnecessarily complicated but also endlessly fascinating!

My wheat trials include some mid nineteenth century heritage varieties (pictured above), so Landrace types which are the oldest types of crop cultivars, they have generic variability giving them the flexibility to cope with a range of environmental and disease pressures, that sounds perfect to cope with our changing climate and my desire to spend less on sprays.
I also have a small area of Spelt which is an ancient wheat/rye type of grain which hasn’t changed since biblical times (are you spotting a trend?) and was first recorded being grown around 5000 BC!

I’m sure the lab teams will be pleased to hear that these will not be coming into the store harvest 22 but instead may form part of a tabletop milling and bread making experiment or perhaps go to supply local artisan bakers. Although Hawk Mill, the water mill beside my house has long since been unable to mill wheat, the National Trust’s Lode watermill is further downstream on the Wilbraham river from me and I’m making enquiries about having some wheat milled by them using “my” water. If this all comes off I may be able to supply flour to any budding Camgrain bread bakers.

More commercially (or perhaps not?) I have some Gleam to supply the clean wheat plant and my usual Hawk Mill GP1 blend of Solstice, Zyatt and Skyfall, which this year is being grown with companions of vetch, winter peas and beans. These companion crops have been sown with the wheat at 30kgs/ha providing around 13 plants a sq/mt which being leguminous should fix some nitrogen from the atmosphere in the spring negating the need to apply so much very expensive bought in bagged nitrogen.

Following my very successful Bi‐Cropping trial of spring beans and oats, “boats”, I’m now growing the winter version which is Mascani oats and Tundra beans, I’m still working on a name for this blend! Masundra?

As well as farmer interest in my Bi‐Cropping activities there are two agronomy companies now trialling different mix seed rates and I’ve turned up some interesting field trial research papers from the early 1990s on the subject, brace yourselves for Bi‐Cropping to become mainstream!

In other news my new (to me) combine harvester turned up this week which means although next harvest will be busier with me doing the job myself again it will also be much more satisfying as I get the see first hand how my, sometimes crazy, trials perform.

I also have had the pleasure of entertaining some possible supply chain partners on farm today (Wednesday) discussing Regenerative Agriculture practices and this was followed up by a meeting at CAPC and brief store tour. With both harvest and more largely Covid restrictions making site visits more difficult of late it had been a while since I’d been around the site but I can report it gets no less impressive with the passing of time and all colleagues that participated in demonstrating what the business does to our guests were utmost professionals in their communications with the group, thank you all.

Thank you for the continued hard work and dedication from all the teams at Camgrain.

Stay safe and well

David