Andrew Huxham finished drilling ahead of schedule at his farm in West Sussex, delighted to have fieldwork complete before the recent storms.
October was a balance between getting crops established and making some key grain marketing decisions:
Conditions were generally good, although 10 hectares of early-drilled wheat had to be re-drilled
Dan Luff to the rescue after a water pipe was ripped up while drilling the last wheat field of the year!
Andrew sold his remaining milling wheat as feed wheat rather than risk deductions for a relatively small premium
He regrets not having sold more new crop now that prices have fallen back from earlier highs
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Transcript
Andrew
Hello and welcome to my “October on the farm” update. It’s a little bit earlier than normal. It’s 25 October today but I’m going away next week with the kids for half-term like I expect a lot of people are.
Thank you very much for all the comments and the shares on last month’s video. That’s really appreciated and I think some of the topics I talked about resonated with a lot of people listening. So thank you very much for the shares and the comments on those, that’s great.
So what have we been up to in October? Well, we finished drilling wheat on the 13th, that included the second wheat. We didn’t have a lot to put in. As you can see here, this is wheat after rape and it’s gone in beautifully. This will be Group 1 milling wheat, I think this is Zyatt up here, quite a heavy clay cap and it has gone in absolutely beautifully.
I would like to say that all of it has gone in beautifully and I’m slightly embarrassed to say that actually we have re-drilled a bit. So, some of the earlier wheat we drilled which was on a farm which had been veg for 30 years, I panicked a bit because when that farm gets wet it gets really wet. So we put some wheat in, the seed bed wasn’t excellent, it probably didn’t quite go in deep enough and as a result there was uneven germination and I think the rooks had quite a lot of it as well.
So about 10 hectares we’ve re-drilled and when we went back to re-drill it we’d had quite a bit of rain and actually it went in perfectly. So we have re-drilled a little bit but on the whole it’s gone in well and it’s come up and looks excellent.
We’ve taken on a new farm which is about 15 miles away from here this year, so it’s a little bit of a stretch for us. We actually go 15 miles to the south-east down towards Bognor Regis now and 15 miles to the north-west up towards Petersfield, so that’s a bit of a stretch. So a lot of our work, now that we’re up together with the fieldwork, will be about logistics for moving forward. So where do we need water tanks on this farm, things like that, possibly a diesel tank.
Of course with a new farm it hasn’t come without its problems. The last field of wheat we drilled this year was on that farm and cultivating the headland we ripped up a water pipe. So we put three cottages off water for a few hours. Fortunately, Dan Luff came to our rescue, who some of you will know, a fellow Hectare founder. He doesn’t farm very far from there. He turned up with a couple of connectors so that we could connect the old water pipe with some poly pipe, do a temporary repair and then we will have to go back to that.
I think we’re going back in two weeks with a digger to see how shallow the pipe really is under the rest of the field and we may have to run a whole new main. But as always Dan came to our rescue, so thank you very much for that, Dan.
I have now completed all my sales for harvest 26 which is great. So I am done and dusted on that. Obviously, there’s still a lot in store to move. It always feels a bit strange to be selling milling wheat or malting barley as a feed product when the spec is there, but when you’re only offered £3, £4, £5 a tonne premium it just doesn’t make sense to move Group 1 milling wheat as milling wheat. Very quickly with a rejection or even just deductions do you lose that premium.
So the last of the wheat we’ve sold has been sold as feed wheat. We’ve also sold quite a bit of the malting barley as feed barley. Fortunately the values have been OK, could always do with it being higher but, you know, they all start with a two which is helpful. Obviously the market’s come back a bit since then. Did I sell much new crop? No. I’ve sold a fair amount of oilseed rape actually, the values are good there, but feed wheat base prices, no, I’ve probably done about 5%. I wish I’d done a bit more because we must be 25 quid off the highs now.
So, that’s a little bit about marketing.
It is really nice to be so up together with the work on the farm. We’ve obviously, I think we’ve had about 120 mil in the last 30 days in Sussex. Of that, probably a quarter of that fell in the last two days. We obviously had Storm Austen come through which was pretty heavy and wild and then we’ve got this next one coming through now and hence the winds got up and everything else. But it is so nice to be in a building listening to pouring rain, knowing that you haven’t actually got any outstanding fieldwork to do and you’ve got all the crops in. Even that 10 hectares we re-drilled and the second wheat is all in, and hopefully will be looking good now, so bring on the weather – we can have a month of this weather in my opinion.
It’s really nice to be so up together with the work. Kit’s being washed off. We start the logistics planning. As part of that, we’ve now got a new vehicle on the farm. We’ve purchased a Citroën Berlingo, which everybody seems to quite like. Three seats in the front, I can pop it on a car trailer and move it around to where people are working quite easily. So that’s made life a lot easier over the past month as well.
And it’s great to see the first print version of our partnership with Farmers Guide, so keep a lookout for that. We’ll be putting some market insights, free market insights in there about what trades and values we’re seeing through the month. So great to see that partnership up and running and hopefully we’ll see lots more things like that.
Thank you very much for listening and I’m looking forward to a holiday next week and I will speak to you all next month.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute advice. While we make every effort to ensure the accuracy of the content at the time of publication, Hectare Trading makes no guarantee regarding the data provided.