Bure Valley Farm

After the enforced break it’s time to push on. In this post we say farewell to Autumn and navigate the long dark days of Winter.

November and there’s still a lot of Lime to apply in preparation for next year’s crops. I intend to get a crop in the ground of field 9, so we have to work hard. I also have a problem to tackle – weeds in our Rape fields. That means I need to make some money fast so that I can get a sprayer. Lets start with the Liming…

…You can see that the previous owner had already limed the field once but without the precision info that I have, they haven’t put down enough. I’m glad of the mini-map on the left – without it I’d struggle to know where I’ve been and where I still need to go!

Late in the 1st week, I saw the opportunity to take a silage contract in field 3. These silage contracts are a license to print money but I knew that field 3 is more than a week’s work and I’ll need the last two weeks to sow and roll field 9. I worked late and finally called a halt to mowing when the rain set in long after sunset. Over halfway through week 2 and I had just about completed the silage baling…

…By the end of the week I’d completed the contract and sold the surplus bales too for a big bonus.

First job to kick off the 3rd week – go and buy a sprayer with selective nozzles. Then it was straight on with the weed-killing…

…You can see the selective spraying of weeds quite clearly – that’s saving a lot of herbicide – good for my pocket and good for the environment. Then I set a worker loose in field 9, tasked with sowing Wheat. Meantime, I took last season’s Rape harvest off to sell as the price was good. The cash from that added to the baling contract cash meant I was able to finally buy a means of transport between sites – a Land Rover. It’s first task was to deliver some additional seeds to our worker…

It was another late end to the week as we had to get the crop sown – you can’t sow in December! Then we were back in field 9 for the last week of the month to roll the surface…

…The last task was replenish seed supplies. I bought a small trailer for the Land Rover to ferry these about…

…The mechanics of the straps in game give me a laugh, sitting on top of the handle of the big bag😅

December was a busy time – selling off our Barley, then the Silage Bales…

…Then I was off to fertilize my Wheat in field 9…

…The field was really barren and I used tons of fertilizer – look at the gauge top left and you can see how big the gap between the existing and ideal levels was! But in the end it was job done…

…with the caveat that we have weeds growing. I would come back to spray them at the beginning of January when they had grown a bit and could be seen. I closed out the month by selling last seasons Wheat.

The dark days of January pass slowly. There is little to do and plenty of time for planning and re-planning. In the future I want ultimately to move into root crops but the time for that is still a long way off – I will need some specialised equipment and probably a replacement tractor for the 7810 before then. However, I can move a step towards that goal by getting a Planter – Planters can sow Sugar Beet. They also allow the planting of Sunflowers and Corn. As you would expect, I have been doing my research as to growing those crops in the UK. Climate change is making Sunflowers viable and they are being grown by some farmers in Suffolk. There is a market for cooking oil but the largest market in the UK is wild birdfeed (I know – I’m a user!). Corn (Maize) is commonly grown for Silage but that is also changing as climate change allows the crop to ripen in the southern counties. That’s the background to a decision I took in February…

Looking at planters I understood that I would have to cultivate a field in preparation to sowing – planters need a seedbed. The issue is that I expected that to compromise my environmental score on the tillage front. After giving that some thought I realised that I would have to accept that on perhaps one or two fields per year. As I looked through the planter and cultivator options I saw an interesting option. As part of the Horsch Agrovation Pack that was released a few months back, I found that the Horsch Finer 6 SL cultivator can also be configured as a seeder and it is a shallow cultivator, so perhaps less damaging to my environmental score. To carry the seeds there is the Partner 1600 – shared by Horsch’s Maestro 9.75 planter. This makes for a very flexible toolkit! Additionally, both of these can do 6m of width in a pass which will save quite a bit of time over a larger field.

I decided that this was the next step but it means change so at the start of February it was farewell to the venerable John Deere 1590…

… and time for the new equipment – The Horsch Finer 6 SL and Partner 1600…

…and the Horsch Maestro 9.75…

Late February and the Finer 6 SL gets to do some seedbed preparation for a crop in field 1…

…It’s a shallow cultivation and doesn’t seem to have hurt my score but I just hope it’s deep enough for the Planter when I come to sow in April. Whether that will be Sunflowers or Corn remains to be seen. Sometime in the Summer I’ll need to buy a suitable header for the harvester too! March is just around the corner so I’ll be sowing grain crops before then😎👍

Back with the Spring report from Bure Valley Farm soon😎👌