It has been a very different autumn this year and a first in my farming career. We have not planted any combinable winter sown crops! But the drill has been very busy drilling cover crops, grass on fields coming pigs and several CSS and SFI mixes.

It doesn’t feel right, but when you look at commodity prices, the probability of more drought prone weather patterns during the growing season on sandy soils and then get the calculator out, you start to wonder what farming it is all about. Seems strange parking the sprayer up in the shed at the beginning of September.

Growing mixes for CSS and SFI is not always as straight forward as drilling it and walking away. Many mixes contain clover which is not the easiest to establish and over the years some fields have been redrilled due to failure for several reasons such as too dry, too wet with slugs and drilling too deep on very light soils.   I rarely have redrilled a cereal, but CSS mixes can be tricky as we are only drilling some at 15kg/ha

Other activities on the farm this week include restoring 7 ponds through DLL managed by the NWT. They are restoring 47 ponds this year in Norfolk and are very slick in their work using an excellent contractor Martin Peck from south Norfolk. He has turned up with 3 excavators and are steaming their way through them. 

 Our ghost ponds are now taking shape and the ones that were done last year are starting to green up.  We will ‘hopefully’ complete 2 projects with the NRT this winter to attenuate water with silt traps and leaky dams which I am very excited about, this will add up to 8 projects that we have done here with the NRT to clean water.

We are also busy in the woods coppicing/felling a parcel of Alder on some low lying meadows while it is dry. 

Also this time of year the spiders are out and making webs on some AB15

Adrian Howes, Farm Manager