Disease: there is some disease in winter barley at present in small amounts. It looks to be in earlier sown crops. You should not treat this disease. The winter should look after it and we cannot be spraying cereal crops for disease in November or we will quickly run out of chemistry.

However, growers should walk their crops and assess them for pests and disease.

If there is disease present then you need to ask why it is there. We have had mild and damp weather, but was the crop sown too early? Where is it in the rotation, is it continuous barley? What variety is it?

Oilseed rape: check crops for light leaf spot. Take some random leaf samples, like you would a soil sample. About 20 leaves. Place them in a plastic bag and put them in a warm room for about three days.

If lesions appear on the backs of the leaves and white dots, you probably have light leaf spot and need to treat it with Proline or Prosaro.

Hedge-cutting: there has been a lot of rain in recent days, so some fields are very wet for hedge-cutting. Mind soil at this time of the year and try and avoid compaction along headlands. It is probably best not to travel.

That said, conditions may disimprove as time goes on depending on rainfall levels, so take an opportunity if it comes. Watch rules around hedge-cutting if you are in ACRES. Hedges in some fields need to be allowed to grow to 1.8m.

If you planted hedges under ACRES in recent years, then weed these hedges if you can. It is also important to cut them. New hedges should be cut back each year to create a thick hedge. Each year you should cut the hedge back where the new shoots are.

New hedges should grow up slowly to allow them to thicken out. If hedges are allowed to grow up to the desired height without cutting them back then they will be thin, won’t provide shelter and may be of less benefit to some wildlife.

Soil sample: on some of the drier days you could take soil samples where they are needed. You need to take soil samples every four years for nitrates. Take samples every 4ha or so. You can take them as big as 5ha.

Many will have smaller samples than this as fields are smaller than 4ha. You should also sample problem areas where crops aren’t performing to see if there is a soil pH issue, for example.

Keep away from spots where lime or farmyard manure were tipped. If you are not sampling yourself make the sampler aware of these issues. Soil samples must now be connected to a LPIS number or a geo-reference (GPS co-ordinates). These numbers should be listed on the soil test results.

If your soil test results do not contain these numbers or are more than four years old then you must assume index four for phosphorus.

Tillage payment: we have no word on when the tillage payment announced in the budget will be paid or how it will be paid.