I dread August every year but I love September. I’m always relieved when the monsoon season is over and we’re into the lovely season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Thankfully, we did get six dry days in a row towards the end of August which allowed us to wrap up the cereal harvest. Beans remain and are about three weeks away but look like they’ll be worth the wait.

After a good start to the wheat harvest, it was declining yields from then on. This was despite crops looking very thick from the combine cab, with enormous straw yields (over five big Heston bales to the acre).

However, clearly the weather had taken its toll and while the bushel weight held up on the variety Costello, the yield did not. But we’ll still stick with Costello in the variety mix for 2020.

So our overall wheat average yield is a disappointing 4.15t/ac adjusted to 15% moisture. I say disappointing because there was huge crop potential out there and this was not realised.

It’s also a relief when a difficult harvest is over. I’m weary of watching forecasts and the rainfall radar, of watching dews lift and fall, watching to see that each trailer load of wheat makes it out of the field with minimal damage. We have some soil structural damage in most fields and I’m not overly confident that all can be min-tilled successfully.

A tillage farming friend of mine who has leased his land was recently asked had he seen the latest weather forecast.

“Weather forecast?” he replied, “I haven’t looked at one of those since 2016.”

He set his land in 2016 and he’s a happier man today. However, I’m very conscious of the fact that happiness is very elusive for a fellow like me. But it would be great to be able to take the weather as it comes and not to give a hoot.

With nigh-on 40 harvests under my belt, I’ve nearly had my fill. I’ll be 60 in a little over a year’s time and I do not envisage spending what years that are left to me watching the weather and sitting on a combine. There must be more to life than growing crops.

But I’m even more disillusioned with cattle.

Brexit here or there, I see no future in buying store cattle to finish. It was always marginal but this year has made it a completely pointless exercise. If a farm enterprise is not making money, it has to be axed. The pastoral beauty of having fine-looking animals grazing the summer fields has to pay for itself.

Besides, cattle are becoming too wild. I bought in 20 bullocks a few months ago and practically every one of them is bloody mad.

Safety

There’s no pleasure in that when your safety is put at risk every time you have them in the yard. That’s if you can get them into the wretched yard, in the first place. A sudden movement to scratch your head in the field sends them into cruise missile mode.

In the meantime, we’ll plough up grassland and reduce our stock numbers.

I don’t necessarily want more tillage but every acre has to be profitable. We’re fortunate in that we have options. For most cattle farmers it’s not that easy.

The wet weather has also held up sowing the winter oilseed rape, between getting straw cleared and soil conditions being far from brilliant. We’ve also cover crops to sow for GLAS. Despite current thinking I’m not a fan and winter-sown cereals or oilseed rape are my favourite form of cover crops.