It is fair to say that 2024 has been another busy and productive year at our farm, The Mead. However, as we will see, the British weather has made it less than plain sailing.
Grab a coffee as Silvery Tweed MD and head farmer, Bob Gladstone reviews the year at The Mead…
Kicking off the 2024 season
The unrelenting weather of Autumn 2023 was a stark contrast to what we had seen 12 months prior, with winter-sown crops finding it difficult, if not impossible, to become established in the wet weather across much of the UK.
Thankfully, the north of England fared better than many of our counterparts in the south, and with some fortunate breaks in the weather, the autumn crops of barley, wheat and linseed all managed to become established, albeit in some marginal soil conditions.
Continuing our commitment to the Countryside Stewardship Scheme
As well as drilling crops, drying grain from the harvest and housing the cattle, we also had work for our countryside stewardship to complete. The main project being undertaken during the winter was replacing and laying new concrete and drainage in the yard at the farm. A large part of our scheme focuses on improving water quality by reducing nutrient run-off and ensuring the segregation of clean from dirty water, with the dirty being cleaned via a series of sediment traps before it enters any watercourse.
By early December, we had completed the concrete work, and while the weather didn’t hamper us too much, we do have some nice reminders of the wildlife that calls the farm home with various deer and pheasant footprints in quiet corners of the farmyard.
Spring, summer and beyond
As 2024 dawned, we felt hopeful that the weather would improve and allow for some timely fieldwork to take place. However, that wasn’t the case as we sat and watched the rain gauge fill up day after day.
In 2023 we had a very late and delayed spring. However, 2024 took that a step further, with spring drilling not completed until the 11th May when the last field of Diablo spring barley was sown. Late drilling like this means a shorter growing season, which has a knock-on effect on the yield potential of the crop.
On the whole, crops established well and went through their growth stages accordingly. However, the distinct lack of sunshine at the critical time of grain fill hampered yields, as we later found out when the combine entered the fields at harvest.
Winter Linseed can only be described as poor but hardly surprising given the weather, winter barley was below average, winter wheat was OK and the spring barley surprised us all and was the star of the show with good yields.
Continuing on the poor weather theme autumn 2024 hasn’t been super but we do have everything drilled and after a dry warm October and early November perhaps things are looking up weather-wise!
2024 in figures
With the fields drilled with crops for the 2025 growing season and the cows back in the sheds for the winter, it is great to look at just what has been produced at The Mead in the last 12 months.
The cows kindly provided us with 953 tons of manure that we spread on the fields. Fields which we have made 628 round bales of straw and 565 (508 tons) round bales of silage.
The combine has been busy this summer harvesting 1,200 tons of cereals. After the harvest, we have drilled 31 hectares of cover crops and 2.3 hectares of supplementary winter bird feed.
Here is to a successful 2025!
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