This has been our earliest harvest ever and at consistently low moistures.

Last Saturday we finished the last of the winter wheat. Both the seed and feed wheats yielded between 4.7t/ac-4.9t/ac, at moistures ranging from 15% to 17.3%, except for one field where for some reason we had very poor establishment on the headlands, though it still gave 4t/ac. The winter barley as I mentioned last week gave from 3.5t/ac to just over 4.1t/ac, at moistures down to as low as 13.4% to a peak of 17.1%.

The bushel weights across the board reflected the energy given by the continuous sunshine during the grain filling period, with several loads of wheat over 78 KPH and all the barley over 67 KPH and up to 70 KPH.

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While the oilseed rape yielded much the same as last year, at almost 2t to the acre, the straw yield from the rape was less than 1t to the acre – 0.8t/ac compared to a full tonne and a half of tightly baled straw last year. Whether this was due to a varietal difference or weather I am not sure.

Certainly the crop was shorter than the very tall crop last year and this may have accounted for the reduced straw yield.

The straw yields from the wheat were also marginally less than what I would have normally expected, but not by much, at slightly less than four 8x4x4s per acre.

I had withdrawn both the wheat and oilseed rape from the straw incorporation scheme on the optimistic assumption that I would end up selling the straw for more than the incorporation payment.

We took advantage of the dry weather to subsoil some of the tramlines.

It is a long time since I have seen such pronounced cracks in the ground, which should give ideal conditions for effective shattering with the subsoiler.

Ideally, we have an excellent opportunity now to trim the hedges, but I am conscious of it being illegal except for traffic safety reasons to cut them before 1 September, so we will leave them for the moment.

We did, however, do some ditch cleaning where I thought there might be a blocked drain opposite a soft spot – which was more obvious after the wet winter – but we couldn’t find any obvious problem.

The more serious question is whether we take a second cut of silage.

While protected urea has been spread, we can hardly expect much bulk in the absence of rain though we had useful showers on Tuesday but more is needed.

Grass growth is practically non existent, with premature heading out reducing quality. Not taking a second cut would reduce the number of cattle we could winter, while forcing us to graze whatever growth there is. I reckon there are another few weeks yet before we have to make fundamental decisions.