We have never had moistures or indeed bushels like this. At this stage, most of the quality measurements on our oilseed rape and barley are back. The oilseed rape moistures varied from 5.9% to 8.2%. The cut off point is 9% – above that penalties apply but below that, as I mentioned last week, there is no bonus payment.

It sounds a bit like “heads I win, tails you lose” in the old games of pitch and toss.

It’s different in the case of the barley, where there is a bonus payment for moistures under 20%, but how far down it applies I am not sure. The results for the barley showed we hit over 70% bushel for some of the Cassia and the moistures on the loads we have returns for went from 14% to 15.8%. I presume the rest of the details will come in over the next few days.

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I will be interested to see how the other two-row barley we had – Orcade – did.

Last week I mentioned the Orcade followed oats, but in fact that was the year before. This year’s Orcade followed wheat, which made the 4.1t yield even better in relation to Cassia’s performance after oilseed rape. All the barley straw is baled – the Orcade into round 4x4 bales at about 13 bales to the acre and the Cassia into 8x4x4 bales at about four to the acre.

I note that the forward prices on offer from our customer have increased a bit – welcome, but nothing like enough to compensate for the increase in costs, especially in the case of fertiliser.

Meanwhile, on the cattle side, the late season increase in beef price has come as a surprise in what would normally be regarded as the beginning of the back end.

We have a few fairly fit cattle on hand, which we are moving to the factory as quickly as we can.

Over the last few dry hot weeks, our main concern has been water. One of our wells began to lose pressure which is the last thing you need in conditions like we have had. When we investigated, it was not the pump nor the well that caused the problem, but the filter we had installed a few years ago to remove turbidity, etc, from the water to have it as clean as possible for spraying the crops.

We had meant to have the system serviced but of course, there is always something more urgent. In any event, our water specialist who had fitted the filter came out and within a hour or so we were back at full efficiency. A lesson learned.

Our main focus now is on the important wheat crop. Some have been tried in the area but few crops have been finished and ours certainly need a few more nail-biting days.

Charlie Wynne

I was sorry to hear of the death of Charlie Wynne, the progressive and competent merchant and feed compounder from Moone, Co Kildare. He was a pioneer of toasting grain to improve digestibility and performance. His attention to detail was legendry as was his quiet charity. We offer our sympathies to his wife Hazel and family. May he rest in peace.