Harvest: Conditions have become a good deal more difficult over the past week, but there tends to be cutting done somewhere almost every day. Yields are holding up well, quality seems excellent, crops are coming ripe and now all we need is a decent spell of weather to save them. Different forecasts give different weather prospects for the days ahead, so let’s hope for the best.

Continued broken weather could result in sprouting in winter wheat, higher moistures, excessive moistures in malting barley and possible germinative energy issues in malting barley.

Straw: Demand still appears to be poor for straw, except from local and regular customers. A number of growers (but still relatively few) are chopping for incorporation. Many cannot chop because they do not have choppers on the combine. If you are chopping a portion of your straw, do it in owned fields that will benefit most.

Straw really needs to be chopped for incorporation. Full-length straw will tend to cause problems during subsequent establishment. It will tend to drag on the plough, cultivators and drills. Also, full length straw takes longer to decay and thus slows the recycling of nutrients. Earthworms cannot cope with long straw because they cannot cut it to get pieces to take into the soil.

Successful incorporation requires that the straw be chopped and then shallow diced. It can be tilled deeper later for min-till or ploughed down.

Oilseed rape: Planting of oilseed rape should ideally be completed this week, but many fields have not been cut yet. Time is of the essence in these situations, so straw needs to be chopped to gain a few days. If straw is incorporated and you are not ploughing, it still needs to be diced in if you are using residual herbicides.

With later planting, use organic manures like poultry litter or pig slurry incorporated ahead of planting. Alternatively, apply 15-20kgN/ha into the seedbed as a compound fertiliser or DAP. With temperatures cooling, it may be important to drive early autumn growth.

For planting this week, consider seeding rates in the order of 35-45 seeds/m2 for hybrids and 70-80 seeds/m2 for conventional varieties. Seedbed quality should influence seed rate. There may also be a benefit in increasing these rates further (+20%) where planting slips into September.

Catch crops: Growers who signed up to the catch crop option within GLAS do not have to plant these crops this autumn. There is nothing stopping a grower from planting some crop strips to learn about different crop options, but this is a matter of choice. However, if a grower committed to plant catch crops for greening purposes then these crops must still be planted.