“So the usual challenges really, but I’m pleased to say that drilling for harvest 27 has kicked off and it’s coming up nicely.”

With harvest 2026 now behind him, Andrew Huxham has turned his attention to establishing summer catch crops and preparing seed for next year at his farm in West Sussex:

• Moving ground and drilling where conditions allowed, while heavier soil has now received enough rain to create good seedbeds

• Dressing next year’s wheat seed and mixing OSR seed with buckwheat and crimson clover

• A gamble on oilseed rape – despite dry conditions, Andrew started drilling oilseed rape on lighter ground, just in time for the recent rain

• Machinery breakdowns added to the workload, but repairs were completed and the 2027 crop establishment is progressing well

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Transcript

Andrew

Hello and welcome to my August update.

I’m a little bit happier than I was last month. I’ve got over the appalling wheat harvest of 2026. The end of harvest wasn’t much of an improvement. We cut some spring beans on about 4 August, which again is very early. They did about two and a half tonnes a hectare, so pretty poor, but...

I’ve got over last harvest, things are looking better and I’ll explain why. So we spent a lot of this month establishing summer catch crops where we could. So we were very picky with where we went cultivating. We have had a bit of damage. We’ve broken a couple of back windows. So we’ve had to make window guards where stones were flicking up from the cultivators. But on the whole, it went OK.

We obviously didn’t have any rain for most of August. So we moved ground where we could. A lot of people were sitting still. We thought, no, we need to try and make some progress somewhere. So we did move some ground. We did drill some summer catch crops. And then we’ve been busy preparing for harvest 27 with seed processing.

So we’ve got all of our wheat seed in stock now, some of which was farm-safe seed. So that’s been dressed, which you’ll see a bit of in the video. And then also oilseed rape seed, we mix in house. We have a big cement mixer we use and we mix that with buckwheat and crimson clover. So we spent a bit of the month doing that, establishing the summer catch crops and we normally start drilling oilseed rape around the sort of last week of August, around 24, 25 August. We ummed and ahhed as to whether or not to start. I know lots of people weren’t and it looked like, the end of last week – it’s the first of September today – the end of last week looked like it was turning a little bit more unsettled.

So we took the gamble and we decided to start drilling oilseed rape where we could make sensible seedbeds on the lighter ground. On 25 August we started that. There was zero moisture, it was a complete gamble and we ended up drilling about 70% of the rape we’ve got to put in for harvest 27.

We couldn’t drill all of it because we couldn’t make the seedbed and actually I felt it was too much of a gamble. But since we’ve done that, we’ve actually, everything that’s been drilled has had 30 mil of rain on over the course of a few days. And a lot of the time it rained at night. So it’s been absolutely perfect. And some of the earliest drilled stuff is now starting to come up. So that’s great. I mean, it was a real gamble. I didn’t know if it was the right decision or not but it’s turned out, I think it’s going to pay off.

So we’ve got rape just emerging, summer catch crops are also emerging after the rain, and then the ground where, the heavy ground we couldn’t make a sensible seedbed for, has now also had 15 mil of rain, probably 20 in total – it had 15 mil about 2am yesterday morning. So we’re now moving that and starting to drill that, and it’s going in beautifully.

So we can put last harvest behind us for a bit and look forward to 2027. We’ve had the usual challenges around machinery breakdowns as well. We check the bearings on the rollers on a daily basis and they get greased, but actually one shaft managed to wear its way out the end of the roller frame. So we had half a day rebuilding that, putting it back together and welding new plates on the ends.

So the usual challenges really, but I’m pleased to say that harvest 27, drilling for harvest 27 has kicked off and it’s coming up nicely. Thank you very much for listening.

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.