It has happened before but not often.

With all the harvest over except for the beans, we are now looking to the harvest of 2027.

We are still not fully clear on what contracts will be on offer and apart from the oilseed rape, we still have some time to consider the options.

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With the rape, it is different.

In our part of the country at least, a consensus seems to have emerged that the best time to aim to sow oilseed rape is around 20 August. That’s next week.

The initial choice is between ploughing and direct drilling after a run with a harrow to produce a tilth.

From a potential yield point of view in a normal year I don’t think there is much in it – but this is not a normal year.

The ground is too hard and too dry to plough properly so all going according to plan, we will undoubtedly go the direct drilling route.

This is one of those unusual years when all going well we should be able to follow winter wheat with oilseed rape.

Normally even if the winter wheat is harvested, the straw has to be cleared and the field tidied up.

This year we have straw cleared and the tramlines subsoiled in the land earmarked for the rape.

Incidentally, oilseed rape is the crop that over the last 20 years has seen by far the greater genetic progress in terms of yield.

When I first started growing it, an acceptable yield was a tonne and a third. A tonne and a half per acre was considered exceptional. Now anything less than 2t/ac is mildly disappointing.

Why there has been such progress in rape compared to mainstream cereals is not clear.

The next major early autumn task is to reseed.

One field we have earmarked is infested with docks though the regrowth from silage has not been too bad.

We will probably use a standard perennial ryegrass / white clover mix, but we have one field which we only use for silage and graze the aftergrass with sheep.

Up to now we have not used any red clover but given the warnings around nitrogen prices, this seems to be an ideal opportunity to try out a new system.

That particular field has a pH of over 7.5 so at least we won’t have to worry about lime.

Meanwhile, we have received our fuel subsidy money under the special compensation scheme that came in after the fuel protests.

Ironically, that same week coincided with a renewed spike in prices as the Iranian / US conflict intensified.

For the first time ever, we paid €3,000 for a fill of green diesel.