I am pleased to say that we finished harvest on Sunday 13th August. Our 496 Hp New Holland CR8.80 combine harvester did not miss a beat. Farm manager Alan Willett was particularly impressed with the satellite auto guidance Intellisteer system which made the job so much easier.
Our Venture winter malting barley was better than anticipated, however Crusoe 2nd wheats were a bit thin. First wheats with Trinity was a different story altogether with better than normal yields. We will have to wait to see what the quality is like when the first samples are analysed by Marriages.
Two loads of our winter barley have been sold and they just scraped through on specification but we suffered a £2 per tonne reduction for being 15.2% moisture, .2% over!
Harvest was uneventful although someone set light to a big bale straw stack and we battled mud in one field trying to get our Propino spring barley in. We were so lucky that we missed a heavy shower that passed nearby as we feel we would have lost the crop. See photo of the same field after a 2 inch deluge 2 days later. We thought that the stack in the lake was less likely to catch fire.
Colin E. Doe
Ernest Doe farms 850 acres in the region of its Ulting headquarters in Essex, growing wheat, barley and oilseed rape.
Farm Manager: Alan Willett
Overseen by Colin E. Doe
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