As the wheat crops emerge, it’s striking the difference in vigour depending on what the preceding crop was.

The seed wheat sown after beans is a vibrant uniform green with clear tramlines and consistently even germination; it is clear that the residual nitrogen from the beans is stimulating growth and development.

On the other hand, the wheat after what was an excellent crop of oats is much more backward with less even germination.

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The straw from the oats was chopped and incorporated into the soil in line with the official “straw incorporation measure”.

But as well as that, it’s clear that what the soil scientists call “the carbon nitrogen ratio” is completely different in the nitrogen-starved, carbon-rich oat ground compared to the nitrogen-rich bean ground.

The key question of course is what is the likely effect of the two different cropping patterns on the eventual yield.

It may come down to simply giving the wheat in the oat ground more nitrogen in the spring and cutting back on the allowance for the wheat following beans but I would be keen to get a snapshot of any other nutritional imbalances. Elsewhere on the crop side, the mild, wet weather has evened up the oilseed rape with the barley volunteers pretty well completely eliminated.

The only tillage field untouched is earmarked for spring beans.

It’s just as well we don’t want to do anything with the ground at the moment as the drains are gushing water from the saturated soil. This saturated soil has made grazing the remaining grass increasingly difficult.

Inevitably, we have compromised by housing more of the heavier cattle and giving most of the rest a fresh paddock twice a day.

It is a tedious job but we are unwilling to leave a mat of dense grass hindering fresh spring grass in a few months’ time.

Normally we would be happy enough to have the last of the cattle in by the first of December.

While we are now moving onto the driest fields, if the rain continues we will have to consider housing everything, though that would eat into our silage supplies and affect our store buying programme in the spring.