It is vital to share your problems

LAST month, I wrote an analogy comparing the performance of the farm business to a journey. It is a journey which at the moment, due to political and currency problems, compounded with the dire weather, is extremely difficult and at times depressing.

Managing, owning or tennanting any farm business is at present fraught with problems and pressures. Agriculture is a solitary business and it is all too easy to feel that your problems are greater than anyone else's, to feel that your problems are insoluble and that you carry all of the responsibilty and blame.

This simply is not the case. No man is an island unto himself. Help is at hand in many shapes and sizes, rather like AA men on our journey.

It is important to talk to someone, a problem shared is a problem halved. Over many years talking to people about their business problems, I have yet to come across the insoluble. The solutions are sometimes not what we would like, but there is always a way ahead.

The coming years are going to be difficult, and everyone will have to assess their own business, to test its viability before proceeding. Never before has budgeting and forecasting been so important. Adapting your business to cope with the new set of circumstances is essential. You can predict what cash will come in over the next year and you must control expenditure within this, cash is king at the moment.

It is vital to share your problems at the moment, many of the causes behind them are beyond your control, but the solutions are not if you act promptly.

At High Mowthorpe, we too have been held back by the weather. We are now drilling second wheats but will need another good week to complete the task. We have gradually increased our seed rates as conditions have deteriorated and are now sowing about 200kg/ha or 13 stone/acre, depending on your age.

It is still possible to get good yields from November-sown crops, provided the 2001 growing season is not too unkind. Some excellent yields were obtained in 1999 from November-January and even February-sown wheat crops, but it is all down to seedbed conditions which, at this time of year, are far more important than sowing date.

If it really is a mess, wait for it to get better, or consider spring cropping or set-aside. We have sown Hereward, Avalon and Claire as first wheats and Napier as our second wheat. Slugs are worse than ever this year, and we seem to have used a tonne of bait.

On the organic acreage, we are using Mallaca, Shammrock, Ghengis and Aardvark. These have been sown at an even higher seed rate, to ensure a high spring plant population to suppress weed growth. Deeper drilling and finer seedbeds, rolled where we could, should help minimize slugs.

We are about to start our autumn weed control on early drilled winter barley, using Encore (pendimethalin + ipu) and will add cypermethrin if aphids are found in the crop.

Even small numbers of aphids in crops in autumn can, given the right conditions, present a risk of yield losses due to BYDV. Severe infections, where obvious crop stunting occurs, can result in avoidable yield losses of 1t/ha, or more, in early-drilled crops. A risk aversion strategy to aphid control remains a wise objective on current knowledge.

In oilseed rape, phoma leaf spot has increased over the last week and our early crops have now reached the spray threshold (20pc of plants affected). We will apply a fungicide, Plover or Punch C, in the next week.

Remember, however bad things seem, someone, somewhere is worse off than you.