A warm Spring day to most is a joyous occasion, for me it just reminds me of the tasks that need to be completed to get our crops back in the ground.

Carrots are a very high input crop and as such, the need for absolute precision and detail is paramount when planning for the season. Accuracy across all passes is essential from soil sampling and selecting ground right through to the harvester settings. For the spring work, planting such a fine seed that produces a huge tonnage per acre means a slight deviation from the ideal establishment is the difference between winning and losing with this crop.

In order to avoid any such pitfalls, a huge amount of time during the winter is spent preparing the machines and planning the process out. Even with this high level of detail, issues always arise.

Two years ago, I had spent weeks labouring over the site selection, checking every single detail from soil texture tests to cropping history to profile pits and had finally decided on putting a portion of the crop in an 18 acre block in two fields. The crop looked great all year and when we dropped the harvester share, we were pleased with the yield.

On leaving the field with the first load, it became apparent I had missed out on one detail. Pulling out of the field and moving up the road, the gradient was such that we couldn’t get up the hill with the trailers, even on tarmac. Loads with 20t of winter wheat sail up and down the hill every year, but not too many in winter when a constant dew and dampness hampered us.

Missing out on a supposed minor detail such an innocuous looking hill meant we had to pull 100 loads up the hill before we got clear of the block, a major nuisance in what was already proving to be a wet harvest. Since my hill mishap, I have added hill gradients to my list of boxes to be ticked before we are satisfied to drop a plough in ground nowadays.