Harvest 2026 Day 14

[00:00:37]So, harvest got day 14. Uh so, we're 2 weeks in. Um which is ridiculous considering it is the 19th of July.

[00:00:46]This is field that was spring oats, variety called Neptune or Neptun.

[00:00:52]Um And uh we harvested this 2 days ago. So, not quite our 5-minute fallow, but Derek's been catching up.

[00:01:00]Drilling cover crops after the oilseed rape fields.

[00:01:05]Just running a topper around the edges of fields just to get rid of some rubbish around the sides.

[00:01:10]Do a bit of margin trimming, which we can do in our strip after the 15th of July.

[00:01:15]And we are planting quite a big mix here. Now, this seed was bought uh for harvest 2025 to be planted.

[00:01:25]So, uh it's really a case of not quite using the seed up, but it needs to be used this year rather than leaving it to overwinter another for another year.

[00:01:36]So, an 8330 uh on the front, the Horizon DSX 9-m one on the back.

[00:01:45]Drilled about 4 1/2 thousand hectares now, maybe a little bit more.

[00:01:51]Should go really well.

[00:01:56]Not putting any fertilizer on or anything like that at the back.

[00:01:59]We're putting this mix on about 20 kilos a hectare and um you might say it's a bit of a bit of a gamble with everything being so dry, but having visited Groundswell this year, the regen farming festival stroke conference, one of the talks I listened to was from a a get an an Hungarian uh agronomist, a farmer, and also an advisor from Poland where the topic was talking about farming in the drought and it definitely feels a little bit like that now. And what a few things I took away from them was one, we're doing the right sort of things in terms of direct drilling, trying to conserve as much moisture as we can.

[00:02:46]Um secondly, growing cover crops to try and build soil health, to cover the soil.

[00:03:01]They were farming with rainfalls of around 500 mil.

[00:03:07]Um our typical annual average here is 700.

[00:03:14]But it'll be a bit less than that unless we get a bit of a correction this year.

[00:03:18]Um and also to try and get these crops in again pretty soon after combining to try and capture any moisture. Now, I'm not saying there's any moisture here at all, there isn't.

[00:03:30]Uh one of the other things they were saying was you need to get these cover crops in before rain. So, over a big acreage, you can't just rush out and plant 500 hectares of stubble turnips over winter cover crop cover crop uh you know, in 5 minutes. So, uh there isn't any rain on the forecast, but we're not using a huge amount of resource. We're probably using 4 or 5 L a hectare of diesel.

[00:04:00]Uh, probably drilling at 5 hectares an hour.

[00:04:05]Um, so in terms of establishment cost, the seed is the biggest one.

[00:04:13]And that needs to be used up.

[00:04:21]Uh, it's putting it in really well, actually. There's been a nice bit of tilt across the top of all of these fields that we've drilled so far.

[00:04:28]Going in really nicely. It's a quite an expensive mix. It's one actually I'm I met a farmer on Nuffield travels back in 2013, guy called Mike Mike on the hills, who's a dry land farmer in South Island, New Zealand. And it's it's based around his mix with a few little tweaks in it here and there. So, it is very much um a warm season sort of summer cover crop with sorghum, buckwheat, vetches, crimson clover, dwarf sunflowers, red clover, Japanese reed millet, fodder radish, lupins, linseed, berseem clover, forage rape, phacelia, mustard, and a little bit of maize in there as well. So, if this grows, then it could put an awful lot of goodness and carbon back into this light soil.

[00:05:30]Over a relatively short period of time, um we did this mix in uh was it 2022?

[00:05:39]I think it was after some peas.

[00:05:42]And just in the above ground biomass, we captured 2 and generated 200 kilos of nitrogen 160 of phosphorus and made that all available to the next crop. So, um it is very dependent on rain.

[00:05:59]But if we get some, this will also deliver some really good results. Uh not only that, the longer term weather forecast is El Nino and a lot of wet weather later on through the autumn. So, if we don't get wheat established in here for whatever reason we hope that we will, obviously we will have a cover crop in here that will keep growing all the way through the winter continuing to fix and store and capture a lot of nutrition, put organic matter back into the soil, feed the soil bugs and biology.

[00:06:38]And then we can take advantage of it next year. So, um that's the thought process.

[00:06:54]And won't be very long out here at all.

[00:07:02]Amazing amount of grasshoppers in here.

[00:07:04]We don't you don't usually see them so many or so many numbers out in the middle of the fields but around the edges in the margins, they're just hopping out of the soil everywhere. There's a lot of oat secondary regrowth in here.

[00:07:19]Um Look at that grasshopper hopping away there.

[00:07:24]Nice to see.

[00:07:26]Uh lots of regrowth in here, so it was good plan to come and cut this.

[00:07:30]Little bit of green in the sample.

[00:07:32]Um but a very very light soil uh light sample quite light grains.

[00:07:40]So, hopefully we can try to turn that around over time by farming in this way. That's the plan.