I’ve heard it said before you need to be an optimist to be a farmer, otherwise you’d struggle to get out of bed in the morning. It’s very true. Our business is a game of percentages.

Essentially we start the year with a notional 100% yield and cash return potential. Each time we make a mistake, we lose a few per cent or often a good few percent of that 100% and the hope is that by the end of the year the remaining percent is enough to keep the show on the road.

One of the most depressing exercises in my industry is when you get a day where you knock a substantial per cent off a crop and you convert it into monetary terms. That is not enjoyable.

As the years have wound on that I’ve been involved in veg and tillage, I’ve noticed it’s getting far easier to lose percentages throughout the season than it is to gain them. One of the areas really upping the ante in this regard is revocation of chemicals.

With veg it is now common to lose whole areas or even fields to issues that previously had chemical control options but now have no control. Mechanical hoeing or chemical hoeing with roundup interrow are all options, but very costly, and often lack the firepower to have any meaningful effect.

As veg growers, we are becoming increasingly organic and in real terms, once linuron is revoked next year, it would take very little to jump the fence across to organic.

Given how small the gap is between organic and conventional production systems, I’d prefer if the gap between organic and conventional prices was narrowed in kind whereby conventional prices will have to increase as we move towards more organic type systems.

It would make me wonder – will there ever be a day where we will move to organic production or will the two systems end up meshing without anybody really noticing?

In the meantime, we are in that period of the year where we are hoping for rain to hold back the irrigators as its hard going on all involved when we start the pumps running; we generally go 24-hour once we start to move around the crops quickly.

Our crops in general look OK, wouldn’t say any better than OK though.

The spring planting campaign went well, albeit with a few of us hanging on by a very thin thread at times trying to stay on top of things. The much-publicised issues around labour have been very evident this year with things improving a lot since silage finished.

We started parnsips on 19 June which is nearly seven weeks earlier than we would normally get going. I’m told they were the first new-season parsnips in the UK and Ireland which I’m not sure what to make of.

Digging has been going well and it’s always nice for the lads to be able to wear a t-shirt while digging root crops.