Bure Valley Farm

September – Rain Showers and Realisation…

I ended my introductory report for August with an explanation of the dilemma I was facing with field 14 – A Potato crop that I was not equipped to harvest and the various options open to me. If you’ve been following my farming over time, you will know that ploughing-in a healthy crop was never really an option (I hate the idea!) After much deliberation while farming in Osada, I took the only really viable decision – I sold the field, bringing in much needed funds.

In another move to improve the financial situation, I applied for a government subsidy which I have been granted. This will bring a small income each month for, to quote the official website, “Managing your land in an environmentally sustainable way”.

Now the work in the Bure Valley begins. My immediate actions were to sell the Massey-Ferguson 3670 – Here I am heading off to the dealers in the early morning…

With a more healthy bank balance I made my first purchase – with fields full of Straw, we already knew what that was going to be…

…A baler – This is a Claas one that includes a bale wrapper which will enable me to create grass silage as well as baling straw (I forgot that I do own a small grass field down near Little London).

A quick look at the information in the top bar on the left of picture above tells a bit of the story of September – sunshine with rain expected. I got my first field (42) baled and drove over to field 44. I had just arrived there when the rain came – there was no point in starting baling the wet straw. In the interim I took a fertilizing job for another farm which gave me a chance to try out some hired equipment…

…In this case a Kubota tractor with Bredal spreader. It was a useful interlude as I’m going to need a spreader myself and it gave a bit of an insight into the size of some other fields. The rain cleared and I was able to get on with my baling…

…The John Deere 7810 working well with the baler. Once that field was complete I drove down to field 43 – here I am at the junction with the B1354, checking for traffic…

Not long after starting work there was another rain interlude and another fertilizing job before I could complete the baling in that field. After the baling was done I headed back to the dealers to get the equipment serviced. In case anyone was wondering, yes the B1354 does get busy…

…and you can wind up with a queue of cars behind a tractor – just like in real life! 🤣

Final big decision of the first week – I bought an Anderson RBM2000 and collected the bales I’d made for delivery to the sell point…

…Concluding the first week’s work.

Week 2 and I decided I should make some money by doing a harvesting job on another farm. I just happened to pick a job in a field in the opposite corner of the map to my farm, so it was a long drive just to get there – useful as I’m still getting to know the map and the sort of distances involved…

No sooner had I got there but we had our first rain shower of the week and I took the opportunity to visit the dealer and buy a soil-sampling unit…

…I will need this to get the soil information on each of my fields that will enable me to improve the yield and farm in an ecologically sound manner. You can buy soil maps but by the time you’ve bought 4 of those, you’ve paid for one of these and the data needs renewing from time to time.

Back to the Harvesting job. It was going to pay close to €10k, so I had a vague Idea this field was quite big😅 I found out it was huge when compared with the fields I have been working in Osada – you can get an impression of the size in the shot below…

…And it’s just a medium sized field on the Saxthorpe map! Roughly 2/3rds through the job we had another rain break and I took soil-samples on fields 41 and 42 while I waited for the weather to clear. Then I completed the harvesting, serviced the harvester, tractor and trailer before completing the week’s work late on a Friday evening by doing soil sampling of fields 43 and 44…

…In the pouring rain!🙄

The third week of the month – time to knuckle down and bale the straw in field 1…

…I had an inkling this was an all-day task and I wasn’t wrong🙄 Here I am delivering some of the bales to the local animal dealer in the late afternoon…

…By the time I finished taking the equipment to the dealers for servicing and returning to my yard, it was another late end to the week.

In the last week of September I did another job of harvesting on a neighbouring farm – field 18 full of Sorghum…

…Another large field and a week’s worth of work but at least it pays well 😎👍

October will see me buying a spreader and preparing a couple of my fields for sowing. I have decided that field 1 is going to be left fallow for now as I will probably need a larger seeder than the one I own and anyway, I have yet to sample the soil there. I’m currently thinking Rape in fields 43 and 42 for this autumn’s sowings.

I’ll conclude with a quick look at what my soil-samples tell me about fields 43 and 44. This is the soil-type distribution in those fields…

…With the info box for field 43 displayed on the left. You can see that so far it has made me a profit of €5k – that was just from selling the straw. The profit will be a lot more than that when I sell the 20k litres of grain in mid-winter. Using the key on the right, you can see that the soil is mainly loam with a small amount of sandy loam which is very good. Field 44 above has a lot of silty clay which is not so good. Both fields have precision farming labels that give their current score – over 50 is where we’re aiming to be and preferably as close to 100 as we can get.

Now here’s the acidity levels map…

…Both fields will need liming to correct their pH values – this is done before sowing and that’s why I need to buy a spreader next! The next map tab shows the nitrogen levels…

…Both fields need fertilizing once we have a crop growing. The final tab shows the previous yield as it was distributed across the field…

…As you would expect the best soil areas of each field had the best yield. Here endeth the lesson… Amen😅

We’ll be back in Osada for my next farming post – hope to see you then 😎👍