Michael and Kathy Fordham are tenant farmers working about 700 acres at Little Horsted in East Sussex. It is a mixed farm, with around 500 acres of cereal crops and a beef suckler herd. The Fordham family has farmed in Little Horsted since Michael's grandfather started there in 1916...
Well - who would have thought that the harvest could go so wrong?
We started on July 22 in glorious sunshine, with high hopes for a good dry run and here we are on August 31, with the last 100 acres of wheat all growing in the ear and the linseed still to cut.
We have only managed cutting on two or three days in any week since July - oh, how we have regretted that feeling of smugness in our last blog!
However, having a contractor has worked well, as he has been here on every day that we could cut. Even when we were rained off, he was able to go away and cut for others who did not get the showers and then be back with us when it was fit to go.
Surprisingly, yields of all the cereals apart from second wheats have been good.
All grain that has been harvested has been taken away, by either Weald Granary or Shoreham Silo Services, so the quality has been easily identified and each load marked for a particular market. For us this works wonderfully, as we are only dealing with grain at harvest and the rest of the year we can get on with something else and use the barns to earn money in other ways!
On a recent local farm tour for the Alzheimer’s Society, our visitors were impressed by the efficiency and the speed of harvest on a rare, dry day.
They watched a lorry being loaded with oats destined for Quaker, wheat being cut and carted for a mill somewhere and saw malting barley destined for beer.
Just putting a tale to each crop means so much more to the public. We do not just grow barley, wheat and oats - it is all grown for an end use and turned into food. We know that this last lot of wheat will finish up as animal feed but we don’t put a gloss on it - we tell it as it is and explain the issues and problems.
A few figures came to light, as they wanted to know how much was in the oat lorry. Michael quickly did a sum and worked out that over 100,000 people could easily be fed for a day by that one load. Therefore, our total oat crop could feed two million people for a day - food for thought, as they say, especially in the light of the plight of the people in Pakistan.
Having had such a good first cut of hay and silage, with up to eight round bales to the acre, our second cut in early August produced just one bale to the acre, so our feed stocks are still very low. Until 15 August, when the rains came, we had no grazing grass and the cattle were beginning to test all the fences and get out on a daily basis. Now everything is green once again - but will it grow enough in the silage fields?
We entered Richard, our only worker, for the Farmers Weekly farm worker of the year award. Sadly he has not reached the shortlist, but never mind - we know his worth. We also cheered him up with the purchase of a second-hand McCormick MTX 140 tractor, complete with front linkage and a loader, which has now become his pride and joy.
He was getting a bad back driving the Case hire tractor and as our old Ford was not really up to the task of heavy cultivations, we bit the bullet and spent some money. He is now like the cat who has had the cream and all his jobs are done with much more enthusiasm.
Following a throwaway remark by a farmer interviewed on the news about cloning of cattle - he said that it was perfectly alright to do this, he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about and anyway, all cornflakes are GM and therefore all new science must be allowed - Michael decided to investigate.
Kelloggs have assured him that no GM maize is used in their English product and Tesco say that all their maize is grown in the UK. Maybe the farmer is just wrong? Regardless, it doesn’t mean that all new science is necessarily good for English farming.
We recently attended the council planning committee to hear them consider our application to build our new shop in the neighbouring village of Isfield. We are delighted to report that it was approved and that most of the villagers are very excited about the prospect of having a village shop and community plots.
We can now turn our attention to the small matter of identifying the finance and then building it - that will keep Richard busy over the winter! Weather permitting, we hope to move in before next Easter.
Michael and Kathy Fordham
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