“A good study of the reality of farming business and where it is going: We found a newspaper recently from 1983 – over 40 years ago. Feed wheat prices were up-to £129 per ton, and a new combine harvester was around £36,000. Fast forward to today, wheat is currently around £185 per ton, and an average sized comparable combine harvester is around £350,000. So, wheat has gone up 43%, combine harvesters have gone up 872%! “

As they say we always need to make hay when the sun shines, and while the sun has been shining, it’s not been consistent enough to get it cut and baled!

We have just 10 acres that we cut largely for our own animals but in the years before we met, James offered it to other farmers locally to bale it…

2023 is just whizzing by, and as we approach July all our minds are very much on the upcoming harvest. We don’t have any Oil Seed Rape, which would be ready in July, so we’re expecting to start around the first week of August, although that totally depends on the weather and how fast things mature.

We’ve got a pretty dismal record so far in bee-keeping here on the farm, so much so it’s actually become a running joke! But we keep trying!

We have a ‘bee mentor’ a lovely chap called Simon who is bursting with bee knowledge and has been helping us for over a year with our beekeeping – he even brought some of his bees here to our ‘apiary’ to see if it was the location that’s the trouble because whatever he says the bees ‘should’ be doing, ours are doing something else(!).

It seems the April showers, like most recent years, have come a little early and with an influx of wet weather these past two weeks it’s certainly thwarting any plan to get on the land for many farmers in the UK – well us, for sure, but thankfully the farmer isn’t stressing about it too much…… yet.

In my ‘old’ job I used to do a fair bit of writing, and I loved that part of what I did. I don’t read as much as I should, and definitely don’t write much anymore, but it occurred to me it could be a nice thing to keep a bit of a diary here on the farm by writing a monthly blog. We can also include other farmers, agri, farm life and country living topics…