I read in last week’s Irish Farmers Journal reports of wheat yielding well from 3.8t to 5t per acre. I have to tell you with certainty our wheat yields this season won’t be at the top end of that exclusive club.

I’ve seldom got 5t/ac and certainly not adjusted to 15% moisture, which is the way grain yields should be quoted. Five tonnes at 22% is 4.5t at 15%. The chances of this happening this year are extremely remote – you’d be better off buying Lotto tickets.

If we average around 3.3t/ac at 15%, that’ll be it, as it’s all I deserve with too many patchy thin crops, a legacy of last autumn’s deluge. In fact, I think I’ll need some form of sedation before I harvest 70 desperately patchy acres of wheat, in particular.

It’ll be a big occasion when the 20t Broughan trailer eventually fills. I’ll crack open a mini Coca-Cola Classic every time to celebrate. A slab of 12 cans will do a lot.

Better wheat, which we have already cut, is doing 3.85t/ac dried but nonetheless it has a sparse Montana look about it from the cab; the combine would handle a 45ft US-style Draper head this year. It’s also painfully slow to ripen.

Good stands of wheat will be rewarded with decent yields this harvest and poor will be useless. As I say, we’ll get the yields we deserve. We generally do.

Weed control

Also very evident from the combine cab is the excellent weed control from the herbicide Alister Flex. The stubbles, even in the thin crops, are very clean.

The grain quality to date is exceptional, perhaps a result of the thin, airy plant stands. Variety wise, it’s going to be hard to beat Costello with its superb quality, standing power and good sprouting resistance. The variety Graham will only play second fiddle to it. Torp is also doing nicely.

But whatever the wheat is like, the spring-sown cereals are worse by a factor of 10. The spring drought, followed by the summer deluge, did untold harm to these crops.

In the barley, there are ripe heads, there are heads at barely cheesy ripe and there are totally green heads, all in the one crop. This is the result of a flush of secondary tillering, after the drought, in what were already thin crops.

It’s a total mess and will be a nightmare to bring to harvest if the weather remains lousy. I doubt any of these crops will be ready before the end of August. The spring oats are similar. But the beans are so good, they’re leaning. Ominous.

The modern combine harvester as we know it is not at its best in unevenly ripe crops. The reaper and binder of bygone days would cope much better in these circumstances, as the grain would ripen evenly in the stook before threshing later in the autumn.

Neither did the yard-based threshing mill blow the screenings or the weed seeds out on to the field, as a combine does, which was a huge advantage. Progress is not without its disadvantages.

Roundup

But thank goodness for Roundup. It will greatly help bring these uneven crops into a combinable state, when the weather won’t co-operate with decent sunshine. I hope the Green Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity, Pippa Hackett (and, indeed, Dara Calleary) are on-side for the impending glyphosate renewal licence.

Without glyphosate, European commercial arable farming dies a death and especially so for non-plough methods of crop establishment and harvest management in a difficult season. Glyphosate’s nearest rival is 93m miles away – the sun.