I am writing this on 24^th July 2026 and once again the weather dominates our lives.

We have a mixed farm in the Midlands which is very different from the arable farms near Cambridge as we run 4 different enterprises: sheep, cattle, hay supplier and arable, all of which demand our continued attention during harvest. This creates its own frustrations as it’s hard to keep one operation going such as harvest when every day we have a variety of jobs to do including cattle to check and feed, sheep to do the same, lambs to sort out and take to the abattoir (twice a week), hay to deliver to our horse customers, straw to bale and cart, and haymaking to finish. Harvest just has to take its turn which this year has been from early morning until lunchtime to try to have a higher moisture content in the grain.

There have been positives and negatives since my last article.

The positives are that:

·          The lambs have grown well with lots of creep feeding (additional food available to just the lambs), we have sold over ¾ of them at good prices.

·          The grass grew well until mid-June, so we had a reasonable crop of hay (over 350 acres) which was easy to make in the sunshine and the barns are full, so plenty to sell to our horse customers who are themselves already feeding a lot. We still have some haymaking to do but harvest intervened!

·          We had some rain in early June which helped the wheat to reach a reasonable yield and quality. However, it was too late to improve the yield of the rape, beans and barley.

·          The grain harvest is easier in a dry summer.

Our problems are:

·          Now we have no grass for the sheep or the cattle, so we are already having to feed them, which is using up the hay we stored for autumn/winter and also very time consuming at a busy time of year.

·          We will not get a second cut of grass so will be short of silage for the winter.

·          The cattle were late being sold this spring/summer as a result of last year’s dry weather when they did not grow as well as usual. The cattle yards are used for holding grain until it goes into store and were not available until last week, so harvest has been slow due to lack of storage space and delays in getting the crop into store.

·          Harvest has also been slowed down by the hot weather because to try and get slightly higher moisture we have only been combining from early morning until about mid-day. Normally we would start mid-morning and could sometimes carry on until the evening. Yields are disappointing when I consider how well the crops looked in the spring, but they are reasonable overall, similar to last year, but very dependent on soil type, as expected with the light soils severely affected by the drought.

·          The combine is starting to show its age, so we have had a few frustrating breakdowns despite it having had a thorough pre -season service.

·          It’s been far too hot to work outside!