Combining is complete for 2023 at Ballicherry, with the last field of spring oats cut on September 16.

It felt like a fair old slog as we started cutting oilseed rape on August 7, and were glad to see the combine put back in the shed, though our now 12-year-old Claas Tucano was pretty reliable having only one small breakdown which stopped us for a morning and was speedily repaired by our local Sellars mechanic.

Harvest as a whole, however, is far from over with baling still to be tidied up due to the showery weather and wheat straw to be loaded and moved into carrot fields ahead of strawing down next month.

We also still have a wee bit of grain drying to catch up on following a fuel pump failure with our drier which stopped for almost a week mid-harvest. For the first time ever at Ballicherry, we cut all our wheat first before cutting any spring barley. This was actually quite good as it meant we got all the wheat cut, dried, and into storage out of the way before we needed to start drying any seed spring barley.

Wheat yields however look to be back on the year at around 9t/ha, not surprising considering the intense heat and drought we had in June, coupled with a cold, dry spring.

On the malting spring barley front we fortunately decided to reduce nitrogen top dressing applications slightly back in May, due to the price of nitrogen at the time, which means all 20 loads of spring barley went to Bairds malt in Inverness with just one load getting a nitrogen deduction for being over 1.65%N, but no rejections.

We also managed to keep skinnings within range, with just one load getting a £1/t deduction for skinnings being over the 8% threshold. All our malting barley is the variety Sassy, which seems to have been less susceptible to skinnings compared to Laureate this year.

Oilseed rape was drilled on August 11 and is looking really well. We drilled it with 120kg/ha of DAP and upped the seed rate slightly to a target plant population of 45 plants/sq/m. We were previously drilling a target population of around 35 plants/sq/m and found this led to large, leafy plants, which in winter died back so much that there was room for pigeons to get in without getting their wings wet and start causing absolute destruction. It will be interesting to see if our trial of increased population is a success and improves yield, or does the opposite, only one way to find out!

On the sheep front, tupping is just around the corner and ewes and gimmers will all be getting a four-in-one bolus in the next week or so. All lambs that were moved into our fattening field have now left the farm, with all having been sold through the live ring at Dingwall Mart. This leaves around 250 lambs left to fatten over winter on the neeps we have grown which are looking really good this year for once!

We have also drilled more than 150 acres of cover crops into stubbles post-harvest, and hopefully, these will provide feed for ewes over winter, allowing us to rest our grass. However, with the way the weather was at harvest, they were probably a week to 10 days late getting drilled so we will have to wait and see if they come too much.