You’ve probably seen fellows like these on television. The tribes in east Africa where the men are decorated from head to toe in brightly coloured clothes and beads and who spend the whole day smoking and chatting while the women do all the work?

It’s a bit like that for a min-till farmer.

Because min-till is such a quick and efficient method of crop establishment, a farmer has loads of time to chill out and talk. And if you can’t find a neighbour to engage with, you phone a laid-back min-till friend and chat away until your hardworking wife or partner returns home from work.

In my case, that’ll be the hardworking Mrs P, who works as a speech therapist, in addition to running a family home with four children. She’s typical of the modern Irish multi-tasking woman, a quality we males do not possess. The closest I get to multi-tasking is reading Classic Tractor while sitting on the toilet.

Shamefully, I have never cooked a family meal or put on the washing machine in my life. Supermarkets are an unexplored territory about which I know nothing. This is largely because I think I’m such a busy male, but really I’m just an Irish version of the African tribesmen.

So do I think myself and other min-till farmers to be lazy and untruthful, as last week’s letter writer Mr A Collins suggests? Lazy is a bit strong and in truth it hurts. But as a neighbour recently reminded me, I’m idle from now until next March. Yes, I have some cattle to look after and some office work to do before the year end, but that’s not real work.

It’s not real work unless you spend the entire autumn ploughing, according to Mr Collins. But he has missed the entire point behind min-till and I shall keep on writing about it until he understands something more about the wonderful living resource which we have in the soil. That could take a while…

In the fields

The November-sown wheat is emerging in a patchy fashion. Anywhere the seedbed was rough, the emergence is poor and particularly so if the seed was treated with Redigo Deter (unnecessary in November).

I fear that we could be looking at resowing some in the spring. I’m really not pleased with any of the autumn work; it’s generally not a pretty sight.

The herbicide Kerb has been sprayed on the winter oilseed rape and given that it needs a cold and wet soil to work properly, it should do a good job now. The sprayer has been flushed through with anti-freeze and is going into hibernation (like me) until the first signs of spring.

I am considering changing the coulters on the Horsch Sprinter drill to increase its versatility as a direct drill. The existing Duett coulters are fine in min-till and ploughed seedbeds but are not suited to direct drilling. They are too power-hungry (even for the fantastic Fendts), as there is too much soil disturbance and seed bounce, resulting in inaccurate placement.

There are a number of coulter options available from after-market suppliers, and I think the Bourgault VOS openers are impressive. They are also more suited to direct drilling beans. I shall buy a few for evaluation.

Speaking of which, we had intended sowing some winter beans, primarily to bring the harvest date forward. But there was no seed available when the fields were dry enough.

So they’ll have to be spring-sown, but if they don’t go in either February or early March, they won’t be sown. I’ve had enough of October combining this year to do me for the rest of my days.

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No need to get nasty over differences