I farm: “Around 40ac of organic cereals and horticultural crops, and I’m the fifth or sixth generation here in Craig. I took the farm over from my mother in 2008 or so. The farm was primarily beef back then. We would have been calf-to-beef until 2017, then we switched the front part of the farm (6ac) to organics, and we put the remainder of the farm into organics in 2019 and got rid of all the stock.”

Crops: “This year, we sowed 31ac of combi crop as well as 3ac of potatoes. I have around 4ac of field vegetables and roughly 6,500 lettuce plants. We also work close to 1,000 tomato plants – we have batches of spring onions and had a patch of carrots as well. It’s enough to drive you mad, but keep you from going mad too.”

Combi crop: “It was my first year sowing combi crop. Other years, I would have just sown oats, but it worked a treat. It was 30% barley, 30% oats and 40% peas. We got the ploughing done early in February and then we got it in around the third week of April, and sowed it at 100kg/ac. It was put in as a fertility-builder, really. All we spread was farmyard manure on the ground last back-end, then we subsoiled it and the peas did the rest. Any legume is a wonderful plant.”

Harvest: “We started to harvest the cereals between dry and wet spells in September. The cereals yielded well – 2.6t/ac. When we were growing oats, we would have been happy with 1.8t/ac up here.”

Weather: “We’re at the mercy of the seasons up here, because we are so far north. When we’re starting harvest here, other parts of the country would be starting to sow – we’d be nearly three weeks behind everyone else.”

Straw: “We don’t bale any straw here, we mulch all the straw because it’s worth more to me going into the ground than it is going out the gate.”