The “Harvest Twitch” has well and truly set in. Symptoms include: excessive washing of the combine harvester, constant grain testing with the moisture meter, phoning other farmers to compare grain moisture percentages and inability to commit to doing anything in case of combining or “cutting” (tech term). It’s a thrill.
Harvest starts when the crop is “ripe” which means it is ready to harvest and the grain is dry enough to harvest. You measure how dry the grain is with a special moisture meter. You put some grain in, turn a handle and it gives you a percentage. If you harvest grain that is too wet, either you have to dry it with a grain dryer (which we don’t have) or it goes mouldy. The winter barley needs to be less than 15%, which means it needs to be less than 14% on the moisture meter. I don’t know why this is, twitchy farmers don’t like too many questions.
As I sit here on the 17th July, the winter barely is ready but a bit wet after another deluge of rain on Monday night, so we are awaiting the sunshine…… that makes this the latest start to harvest in the last five years. Harvests generally have been getting earlier, but with the wet weather this spring the crop has taken longer to die off than normal and the continued rain.
means it hasn’t “turned” (another tech term) as early as normal. This isn’t necessarily a problem and can mean there is more and healthier crops to harvest….but it doesn’t help the Harvest Twitch.
The other problem you can get with very heavy rain is that big crops with lots of heavy grain in them get flattened by the rain and lie on the ground rather than standing up tall. This means the crops can take longer to dry and grain can fall onto to the ground (not where you want it).
Once they get going in theory different crops ripen and are “ready” (another tech term) at different times, which helps spread the workload over the harvest period….watch this space. Results will (hopefully!) be in next newsletter.
Just sunshine now please!