October has been slightly warmer than average, but we’ve had far less sunshine than normal. Rainfall has been above average with 61mm – our average for the month usually being 48mm.

I cannot speak for the whole country, but the wet weather we have had here in September and October has made farming quite difficult. There is very little evaporation out there to dry the soil at the end of October. However, a week of dry weather will make a lot of difference and two weeks would be even better.

Our target of getting all the potatoes up in October wasn’t met, even though we started 10 days earlier than last year. It is the wet weather that has slowed our progress; when the soil is wet, it is difficult to separate it from the potatoes. We are now progressing and all our bodied land has been lifted – the end is in sight, as we are in the last field now.

We’ve had to pick which fields to drill our winter wheat. The soil won’t flow through the drill in some fields, but with a few more days of dry weather, we should be able to drill them all.
It hasn’t been a pleasant autumn on the farm, with mud sticking to our boots and when a job was done, it wasn’t done well. We’re also having to put in extra time, as most jobs are taking longer than usual.

I was nominated for the British Farming Awards, and I went along to the awards dinner on October 17th, with 1,000 other people. There were many other categories, such as the best dairy farmer, best sheep farmer and so on, and I was delighted to win the Arable Farmer of the Year award.

However, more significant to me was that the judges recognise that a good farmer now is one who is also looking after the countryside. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the arable farmer award would have gone to the farmer who had the tidiest farm, who ploughed closest to the dyke or hedge, trimmed all his hedges and roadsides, and had the largest yields.

The Deepings ploughing match is held every year on the last Saturday in October. It’s not all about ploughing but it is well worth having a look at all the ploughmen. There are horses ploughing, vintage tractors, modern tractors, trailed and mounted ploughs.

There are also silver cups for the best sample of wheat, barley, peas, beans and potatoes. We entered samples of eight white potatoes and eight red potatoes, and won both classes and cups and also the best sample overall. We also entered the largest potato and won that too! My thanks go to my son-in-law Robert, for growing such good samples, as I wouldn’t have been able to pick the winning sample from a poor crop.

Swallows

It’s a bit depressing with the mornings drawing in two minutes a day, but as I walk around our yard at daybreak it is very heartening to hear all the Robins singing. We must have six or seven singing around the farm yard.

I saw Swallows on most days until September 30th, but none afterwards. I did however see a lone Swallow on October 23rd on Holbeach Marsh, when I was doing a wader count. It was most likely lost and would’ve been lucky to find any insects to eat. Swallows that breed around here had all left their breeding sites by the end of the first week in September; they’re leaving earlier as I presume there are so few flies. The Swallows seen in the following three weeks were migrating from further north, or even from Scandinavia.

I have just started to see a few Fieldfares. 45 years ago we could expect good flocks of them by the middle of October, I suppose their lateness is all about our rising temperatures. However,

I do know that Fieldfares have been arriving in the west country and I did see a flock of about 100 passing high over the Farmhouse on October 15th.
Birds are very good at remembering food sources; they probably spend 75% of their life looking for food. They will remember that they had a few weeks eating apples in an old cider orchard last year and will head straight over there this year.

Lapwings, Golden Plovers, Starlings, Wood Pigeons and Teal have been arriving on the farm since mid-October. My estimate was that we had 2,000 Lapwings and 1,000 Golden plover, 800 Wood Pigeons and 5,000 Starlings by the end of October and they were all centred around the fields where we had grown millet, canary seed and sunflowers.

The Lapwings and Golden Plovers just sit on the fields during the day, but as dusk falls they get active and spread out feeding on the invertebrates that become active in the night. The Starlings, of course, are active during the day and it would seem that the bigger the flock, the faster they would move around to feed. The bird seed crops are minority crops and the seeds produced are attractive to a wide range of wildlife, birds, small mammals and insects. When the combine was just finishing one field of millet, there were 24 Buzzards on the field feeding on the voles that had been exposed to them.

Barn Owls have had a good autumn, although numbers of breeding pairs were down this summer, due to the very poor year, last year. We had 12 pairs breeding in the boxes that we’ve put up, nine of which are on my land. They reared an average of two per pair on the first brood and an average of three on the second brood. The young will stay around for as long as there are plenty of voles around. The prospects for next year rests with the voles and with the weather. Voles do not like a lot of wet weather, as generally they don’t breed well. The highest density of Barn Owls is in the driest part of the country, here in Lincolnshire, even though we have the least tussocky grass – the voles favourite habitat.