Despite the mediocre forecast, we thought there was no reason for urgency in sowing the oilseed rape.

At this stage it is one of our more valuable crops, so we were keen to get slurry spread on the stubble-cultivated ground to give the crop a good start.

We were following a field of winter barley and, as I mentioned with the early harvest also, a field of winter wheat.

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We got all the fields nicely covered and the seed had arrived in good time, so we were all set to go on Wednesday of last week.

There is no doubt we were complacent. It rained enough on Tuesday to make us postpone the heavy harrowing and direct drilling we had intended.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been better not to have stubble cultivated, as the spongy soil left the top of the ground too sticky for sowing.

The next day, it rained and effectively didn’t stop all weekend. How long do we wait to sow and will the soil underneath be dry enough to allow the next option of ploughing and following directly with the one pass?

We will give it a few days yet but after all the plans and weather that we thought was too dry, it’s a frustrating start to the 2026 planting season.

If we don’t get the oilseed rape sown, it will throw our cropping plans for the 2027 harvest into disarray.

One other side effect of the heavy rain was that instead of adding water to help with the agitation of the slurry, we have our tank that contains the yard run-off nearly overflowing for the first time since the spring.

Out on the land, the grass growth has been explosive. We will take our final cut of silage as soon as possible.

Suddenly the cattle out grazing have lots of grass though I suspect that the much higher moisture content will see a reduction in liveweight gain, as they change from the high dry matter drought-affected material.