Normally, the winter barley harvest begins sometime between the Galway Races and the Dublin Horse Show. This year, as the horse show finished last week, so did the wheat harvest. We had in a continuous run, completed the winter barley and moved on immediately to the oilseed rape.

At the same time, the convoy of combine, chaser bin and lorries arrived to harvest and take away the gluten-free oats and then, at least 10 days earlier than I ever remember, we took a view that the winter wheat was ready to cut and by Saturday evening, the 2025 cereal harvest was finished with only the beans remaining.

In many ways, it all happened so quickly that it was almost an anticlimax after practically a full year watching and caring for the crops. So, how did they do? It was clear all year that with the excellent sowing conditions of last autumn that they had a good start and, at the end of the day in yield terms, none of them disappointed – though what price we end up with is another matter.

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At this stage with some of the details still to be finalised, the gluten-free oats that followed oilseed rape seems to have performed above average with over 4t/ac. The wheat seems to have done about 4.5t/ac with the final figures for the Clearfield oilseed rape coming in at 1.9t/ac, well above what I hear is the normal for Clearfield, but I have heard of 2.2t/ac plus for some of the high-yielding hybrid rape varieties.

The moisture content for the rape varied from 8.8% to 11%, satisfactory, especially when we did not wait my normal four weeks after the Roundup. At this stage, everything is safely baled, apart from the oaten straw which we chopped.

The barley straw is gone for bedding, the wheaten straw for mushrooms and, true to his word, my neighbour took all the oilseed rape straw. He had a moisture metre on his baler which I had never seen before, and baled it at around 11% which he declared to be ideal for his solid-fuel burner. It was the first time I had sold rape straw by the baled tonne rather than on the flat. Having withdrawn it from the straw chopping scheme, I will be keen to see how the returns compare.

In the middle of all the tillage activity, we got the second-cut silage mown and picked up with our contractor’s self-propelled precision chop and a full team.

It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of our former colleague, John O’Reilly. He was the Irish Farmers Journal’s first Agribusiness Editor and set an exemplary standard of accuracy and ethics. Full obituary next week.