The farm is still in hibernation mode with stuff sitting quite still over the winter months but generally everything is looking okay. The Jack First we have had over the past week can be quite helpful for cropping because it kills and “breaks the cycle” of some pests and diseases. “In the olden days” when regular and longer frosts were more common, this was a great form of pest control because many of the organisms damaging crops could not survive over winter and therefore you started with a cleaner crop in the spring. So we are hopeful this will have helped this year.
With the changing climate and the less regular frosts, this doesn’t happen so much and therefore other forms of pest control have to be used more. It is these types of impacts of climate change that farmers are already feeling that aren’t as obvious to others. So we like frost……or do we….? As discussed, we never miss an opportunity to moan about the weather and whilst the frost is good in some cases…..it isn’t helping the sugarbeet that is currently in the ground waiting for harvest! Cue, a very tense farmer looking at his sugarbeet a lot.
The sugarbeet was planted in spring and is ready to harvest in the autumn, so half of the beet has already gone to the British Sugar factory and is now in your cup of tea or cupboard in silver spoon packets. But, the sugarbeet factory cannot process all the sugar at the same time, nor can it store it all. So instead, they stagger the harvest over the winter months. Mostly the sugarbeet is better “stored” still living in the ground and a longer period growing can increase the yield slightly. But, if the temperature gets low enough to freeze the whole sugarbeet in the ground for a period of multiple days and then harvested and left for a bit (there’s more specifics than this but as far as I can work out this is the general gist) it rots. No good. And the factory will reject it. Nightmare. Hence the tense farmer. Fortunately, it thawed today, he has had a look and “thinks it will be okay”, I’ll keep you posted.
Our 5 year stewardship scheme also came to a end at the end of December! So we have put the same habitat areas into a the new Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme which is good! There are a few new options available under the new scheme so we are investigating those as well.
Probably mentioned the weather enough.