Farming News – October 2024

This has been a strange year, 6 dark, wet months followed by 3 dry, droughty months. This has enabled most crops to be harvested, but the weather pendulum appears to be swinging back towards rain. The harvest seems to have been one of very little yield in any of the spring sown crops. Even the over-wintered potatoes gave very little return but even so, this was an improvement on the losses created by the surrounding spring barley. I was however expecting this after the deluge in spring.

After talking to other potato growers and picking my first rows, I am expecting a season of small potatoes and below average yields, but they are planted on gently sloping ground, so I am hopeful of being able to pick them during October.

Autumn is the season for letting the tups in with the ewes and the way of telling which ewes are (hopefully) in lamb, is to put a coloured marker onto the sternum of each tup. This transfers to the rump of each mated ewe. I try to change the rudd colour each week; rudd is an old word for red, although it comes in assorted colours. I apply these from yellow, progressing through the spectrum to red, which indicates the later lambing ewes. Those who are acquainted with Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd will remember the ‘reddy man’ whose job was to move from farm to farm to ‘rudd’ the tups.