Winter 2020

Berkshire Farm Girl Eleanor Gilbert is on a mission – she wants to educate people about farming in the 21st century. In a regular column for Out&About, Eleanor takes

readers through the farming seasons and the ups and downs of the industry. Currently in her first year at Harper Adams Agricultural University in Shropshire, Eleanor regularly goes home to Rookery Farm, Newbury, to help out. Here she explains how the farm readies itself for the winter months. 2020 is a year most people want to forget – including farmers. The wet winter and dry spring resulted in a very poor harvest. This may cause prices to rise for your loaf of bread or bag of flour, as the UK will need to import more grain to feed the nation. This in itself will be interesting when we as a nation start to negotiate trade deals with countries from all over the world following Brexit. The UK wheat production is expected to be less than 10 million tonnes this year, much lower than the average of 15 million tonnes and significantly less than the 16 million tonnes we harvested last year. There is also a shortage of hay and straw this year as the crops did just not grow as we had hoped. Straw merchants from across the country were scrambling to buy straw the moment it was baled and were going direct to fields and loading their lorries there to ensure their supply. Power stations normally purchase hundreds of thousands of tonnes of straw to burn, but livestock farmers will also need to access this product to feed and bed animals, so you may see farmers finding alternative feed and bedding solutions as they just don’t have the profit margin to pay higher prices for a resource that may become expensive because it is in short supply. So, what’s been happening on the farm? As soon as the linseed, winter barley, oil seed rape, winter wheat etc were in the shed, farmers across the country were busy preparing their land ready for drilling – sowing/planting – to give the crops the best start.

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O&A WINTER 2020