Today we have finally had some rain, the first noteworthy amount since early June. As I write, we have had 5mm, and it looks like there should be more throughout the day, so we shall keep our fingers crossed!

This harvest was historic, but sadly not for many of the right reasons. We have farmed here since 1870, and this is the first time we have ever finished in July, with yields that would have been more familiar to my great grandparents than our modern expectations. On the positive side, harvest was a doddle, we had no breakdowns, could run more-or-less whenever we liked, didn’t have to work in the dark, there was no drying and mostly good quality.

The constant threat of fire has been a considerable worry; one day four separate fires started within about 15 miles of here, so with each stage of the harvest completing, it has brought a certain amount of relief as the risk, or at least the consequences of a fire reduced. The final great relief was to see the straw carted off the farm last week; these large stacks seem terribly vulnerable and having them about is always a concern. We normally prefer not to bale straw and to put the material back into the soil, but with grain prices being so low until recently and all the input costs rising, with straw prices being fair, we felt we needed to take the opportunity to get some cash into the business. Hopefully, it might offset the losses we are likely to see elsewhere.

Finishing so early has also meant that we have done some of the things that are often left for the Autumn. The combine is cleaned down, the corn store has had a deep cleaning (rather like what happens at Camgrain, floor vents lifted and vacuumed out, walls blown down, floors swept and vacuumed etc.) and reverted to its status as a general farm depot, the lambs have been weaned and moved to the final bit of (dead) grass, a capital grant application was made (including another large water storage tank!), I have set some things in order on my engineering business, and we have had a couple of days’ holiday. Our drill tractor suddenly lost boost pressure when I was shunting equipment around just before harvest, so that had to urgently be attended to with the season rapidly coming at us – it turned out to be a threaded plug which had come loose and dropped out of the back of the inlet manifold. In a remarkable stroke of luck, it dropped down onto the exhaust manifold and stuck there instead of falling off on the road, so apart from being a challenge to fish out, at least we weren’t trying to locate an obscure part for a 30-year-old tractor.

This week, in anticipation of the rain, we have drilled our oilseed rape. We started by using a low disturbance subsoiler which I am very pleased, and somewhat relieved to report did an excellent job, (since I happened to design it!). We then rolled to crack any surface clods and make sure the top wasn’t too loose if the rain beat us to it, before going in with the drill and a final rolling to get good seed-to-soil contact. Beforehand we dug test holes and debated whether we should subsoil since the soil structure was actually pretty good, but it was baked rock-hard for 8 weeks, so it seemed doubtful that the rape would be happy rooting into unless we had six inches of rain to soften it up. Normally rape will germinate with dew – that which gets thrown from the back of the combine usually grows within a few days of the combine going through, and there is often a thick green mat by ten to fourteen days after harvest, but this year in a very tangible demonstration of how dry it has been, there has not yet been one rape volunteer despite rape having been cut in June. Hopefully, today’s rain will be significant enough to cause germination and to get a bit of moisture down deeper to keep things growing.

Next, we move to drilling herbal leys and cover crops – ironically, it looks like we might be doing this in between showers! If we can get them in, and the moisture remains, they should establish well with warm soils and good day length, which would be very positive after a trying few months.