HARVEST 2017 is still well underway up here on the Black Isle, with several hundred hectares of straw left to be baled. 
We finished cutting cereals last week after deciding enough was enough and if it would go through the combine, it was getting cut. 
In hindsight, if we had been a bit less picky at the start of harvest and got the combine going earlier in the morning on the good days, regardless of the damp, we would have shortened our harvest by a couple of weeks. But then again, who wasn’t optimistic a month ago that there was a heat wave coming and that we’d cut everything at 18% or under? 
With the unremitting wet weather has also come issues with malting barley quality, though yields are good, averaging 7.2 tonnes/ha across all varieties. We have had approximately 300 tonnes of malting barley rejected due to splitting which we feel is due to poor variety response to the wet weather. 
We grew both the failed varieties last year, but in smaller areas and all went off farm with no quality issues at all. In hindsight, the decision to double the areas of these varieties without knowing much about how they may perform on a wet year was brave, but isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? 
Next year, we plan to scrap these varieties and introduce new ones, most likely Laureate, which seems to have done well with other growers this harvest in terms of yield and quality. That said, we will continue to primarily grow Concerto for the time being, which is a variety we know and trust to perform well on both wet and dry years in regards to quality and yield. 
Looking at wheat, we grew Motown for the first time this year and to look at, she wasn’t pretty. Early maturing, with short heads, the crop looked doomed to yield below 8 tonnes/ha when we walked it in early August. 
However, this early maturing variety worked in well at harvest and we actually cut it before the majority of the spring barley. It looks like Motown averaged 11.2 tonnes/ha, and the 2.5 ha plot we entered into the YEN competition yielded 12.55 tonnes/ha, which, though not record breaking, we are really pleased with. 
Due to ground conditions, we have been unable to get any wheat drilled, but aren’t too worried yet as we quite often drill well into the first week of October. We will be continuing with Motown and are also growing 16 ha of Jackal wheat, all of which is grown for seed. 
The OSR was drilled on August 16 and at the moment is looking good, having been sown at 36 seeds per sq/m. We decided only to applied ferric phosphate slug pellets this year to the headlands at a cost of £13.75/ha, plus contractor spreading charge. 
As we usually drill our OSR into fields which have had straw incorporated into them in the spring following carrots, it can create a perfect habitat for slugs, therefore, we were slightly wary about reducing the use of the pellets. 
Thankfully, on inspection, it seems to have worked out and slug damage looks minimal. Cover crops have just been drilled, though we did have to change the fields we were meant to put it in to due to straw still lying. 
We had intended to drill a radish/mustard mix to see if it helped increase organic matter and reduce compaction. But we reckon it is now too late in the year for radish to grow into anything useful and have instead drilled a cheap and cheerful mustard and barley mix to tick the box.
One good decision we made this year was the purchase of a Fransgard wuffler – now there’s an old term! – at a cost of just under £5000. We have been able to bale a huge amount more good straw thanks to this piece of kit and feel it will pay for itself multiple times over if the next few harvests are anything like this one! 
One of the very few comedy moments during this miserable harvest involved said Fransgard during my brother, Andrew’s annual harvest holiday, where he enjoys a break from city life for a weekend. Dad asked him to put the wuffler on while we went and did something else. 
Andrew reported that he could only see one implement matching the description given, admittedly because I had parked a trailer in front of the wuffler, so by power of elimination decided to hook on the topper and got ready to go! 
Maybe we should be cursing ourselves for laughing about it, rather than leaving the topper on and letting him chop the lot – it probably would have been less stressful!