We only had one frost in December and it was far milder than usual, with a mean average of 7.2°C. The 50-year average for December was 3°C, with only December 2015 warmer than last month. Every December since 2022, has been above the 50-year average temperature. It has also been a bit wetter than usual with 49mm of rain, making 2024 a wet year here in Deeping Fen. Our yearly average is 531mm and 2024 was 702mm, only the second time I have recorded over 700mm in a year.

I started these newsletters about 20 years ago. For the first few years I only wrote four or five a year, but due to popular demand they were increased to one every month – and we are now on the 200th edition!

It was a wet autumn, which doesn’t suit our farm. Whilst harvest is underway, every day is getting shorter and quite often wetter, so it is a race against time to get all the autumn work done. When it is so wet, we don’t always get all the autumn crops sown, but despite the weather we have now completed all our autumn work and are now able to start repairing and modifying our machinery and buildings.

Ideally farmers who put all their crops through the combine harvester would like all their crops sown in the autumn as these crops yield more than spring sown crops. However, with so many crops sown in the autumn, this has led to a grass weed called blackgrass becoming a problem. It has become resistant to our herbicides and in places can swamp those autumn sown crops, reducing their yield by up to 50%. The best way of controlling blackgrass is to have spring sown crops for three or four years in a row as it is an autumn germinating weed. But it’s not quite so simple as that – when you have a heavy infestation of it some of it does germinate in the spring and so blackgrass has become a real problem in eastern England.

Potatoes and all our bird seed crops are sown in the spring, so we are better organised to keep the blackgrass at bay than most farmers.

You may not have noticed, but the price of potatoes has gone up in the last year. There will be enough potatoes to go round this summer, but no surplus. For the last four or five years, too many potatoes have been grown, which has resulted in low prices to the growers. This means some growers have stopped growing them and this includes those who grow the seed potatoes. Now we are told that there have not been enough seed potatoes grown in 2024 to plant all the acres needed to be grown in 2025. We have all our seed potatoes bought, but we don’t have them all on the farm yet.

Wheat and Barley yields for the 2024 harvest were generally below average and prices are also below where we would like them to be, so harvest 2024 for many farmers has not been a good one

Kestrel

I have recently been looking back through my wildlife diaries and notebooks and the decline in wildlife has been catastrophic. 40 years ago, I was finding 25 Linnets nests a year, 30 Swallow nests, 25 Corn Bunting nests and 20 Yellow Wagtail nests. If I could find a total of three of any of those species this year it would be Linnet, all the other species have declined so much I would be lucky to find one of them.

Only by looking through these notebooks and diaries do I realise how much wildlife has declined and I would say that there are only about 10% of our resident farmland birds around now that there were in 1960 when I started keeping a diary. The bird that stands out is of course the Wood Pigeon, mainly because it doesn’t have insects in its diet. It will eat them, but it can do without them and they are currently busy eating berries.

In our Café Wildlife Garden, we have grown a lot of pyracantha and cotoneaster bushes for Blackbirds, and I was thinking there must be a lot of Blackbirds around as the berries were going fast – but I was wrong. On Christmas day, I disturbed about 40 Wood Pigeons on cotoneaster bushes. But the main reason the Wood Pigeon has done so well is because it can eat dry grain, then after a drink it makes pigeon milk which it then regurgitates to its young (see image). Other birds are searching for our declining insects to feed their young.

One bird that has done well is the Barn Owl – another that doesn’t need insects in its diet. It feeds on small mammals, mainly bank and field voles, and the voles feed on grass shoots. There are more Barn Owls in the Fens than anywhere else in the UK; maybe our soils suit the voles, but the Owls must have somewhere to nest. Isolated brick barns are their preferred nest sites, most of which are in poor repair as they are of no use to a farmer. Many people, including myself, have put boxes on top of poles, but they are only a temporary nest site.

A more permanent site is a brick tower – we have a few built on our farm. Large bale stacks are also suitable nesting places, but if farmers don’t know owls are nesting in them, sometimes the contents of a Barn Owl nest will fall to the ground when contractors come to take the bales away.

The only birds of prey we saw on the farm fifty years ago were Kestrels. Every day I can now see Buzzards, Kites, Marsh Harriers and Sparrowhawks. Peregrines, Hobbys and Goshawks can all be seen occasionally, they are all doing very well.

Also fifty years ago, we never saw a Magpie or a Carrion Crow. They have both increased as traffic on the roads has increased and we now serve them breakfast every morning on the road. Kites and Buzzards also benefit from roadkill, but their main food will be the game birds that are reared all over the country. They haven’t been brought up by their parents and they are not fully aware of danger making them an easy meal for a fox, a badger, a kite or a buzzard. These raptors aren’t particular about what they eat and unfortunately our declining songbirds are fair game as well.