Harvest and Drilling Progress

Some farmers have now effectively written off the rest of their un-harvested cereal crops, either letting sheep in to gain whatever value possible from the remaining stalks or simply leaving it.  Nationwide this is probably not particularly significant in tonnage or area but is important in terms of morale.  This situation is the extreme, but many are in the slightly less extreme position of having failed to cultivate or drill their autumn crops.  

Farms thoughout the UK are faced with a range ofproblems in establishing their crops.   These include inaccessibility because of water logging, massive slug populations, cold anaerobic soils, compaction, and so on.  These problems have created other issues; farmers have changed their rotations, drilled parts of fields leading to split rotations within fields, have bags of seed left over for returning or next year and so on.

Seed availability has been a problem too.  Notwithstanding the crops grown for seed on a buyer’s option (merchant has the option whether to buy it or not), merchants have been experiencing low supply of several varieties. Screenings have been as high in some cases as 25% rather than a normal 5%, rejections could be around 10% higher and yields almost 15% lower.  Multiply all these percentages together and the remaining seed stock comes out at 61% of the expected tonnage.  Needless to say, spring crop varieties have already been doing brisk trade. These figures are example figures given by several merchants but not statistically evidenced.

We are assuming the spring crop area will be high in 2013, like it was in 2009 following a very wet autumn 2008.   However, some areas of land, if they are not accessible now, could quite plausibly not be accessible in the spring either.

It appears that, at least in the short term, it is the oilseed rape establishment that many farmers are most concerned about.  The area drilled is not the area that was planned for and likewise, the area that remains in the ground through to harvest is probably going to be rather different to the drilled area. It is already looking likely that OSR plantings will be lower in 2013 than in 2012.  Some farmers have reported abysmally low levels of germination and slugs on a biblical scale.