The week of dry weather came when it was really needed.

We finished the bean harvest. At 2.25t/ha, the yield reinforced my view on the unpredictability of beans as a reliable profitable crop – without the production aid they would be a non-starter. This year they got every chance, sown early in March, good weed control though with some red shank in one field and reasonable growing conditions all summer as well as good disease control.

Granted there were some warm days and a dry spell but comparatively they are much more variable than wheat or barley or even oats which is similarly meant to like cool moist summers but which I have found much more reliable than the beans.

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One interesting aspect of this year’s bean harvest was that a neighbour with a solid fuel boiler asked if I would leave some of the straw unchopped so that he could try it in his boiler. We haven’t agreed a price yet but he baled it and took it home. I will be interested to get his feedback.

The oilseed rape straw earlier in the summer also went for burning. And while the calorific value of rape straw for burning is well-established, this is the first time that I have heard of bean straw being tried in this way. We also made a real effort to get the slatted houses empty for the winter.

The aftergrass was far too advanced for slurry but with no land ploughed yet for cereals, there was space to put out about 2,000 gallons per acre. We kept going, before the closed period, until the slurry was finished and the tanks empty.

We still have the old single slats but inevitably we have occasional breakages and erosion of the concrete around the metal reinforcing. Single slats are pretty well unobtainable at this stage so we have to lift in a gang of five slats and remove the slats in good condition and keep them as spares. It’s a messy job but has to be done – the nightmare scenario is a group of adjacent slats breaking and cattle falling into a full tank of slurry.

The last major post-harvest job that needed reasonable weather was spraying off the volunteers and weeds in the fields intended for sowing this autumn. Even where we stubble cultivated, there has been an explosion of growth. We had no option but to control it and we are now really ready to start into the autumn sowing season.