Something in the box...?

The remote camera has been out again and has a weeks worth of tremendous footage. For the time being, can you guess what it is?

YFC Answers and possible a few more questions!

I have had a number of readers ask for the answers to the YFC Valuation day questions that I posted, I have found the answer sheet and so here are the answers that they aim for!  

·         Calculate the cost of re-roofing the farmhouse roof (show your workings).

Calculated from the Insurance rebuild a estimate cost would be £35,000 depending on level of any damage or structure problems that might be found.

• In the context of residential property, what does ‘Ag Tag’ mean?

A property sublect to agricultural occupancy condition, i.e. the occupant must be employed or last employed in agriucture or widow or widower of such a person.

• Calculate a basic gross margin for this field, assuming the field is 20 ha (49 acres)

The field they were shown was a field of Winter wheat and the gross market was taken from The John Nix Farm Management Pocketbook 2011 at £985/ha

• Estimate the average wheat yields (t/acre or t/ha) :-

World Average - 7.1t/ha, UK Average - 7.8t/ha, Lodge Farm Westhorpe - 9.8t/ha, World Record – 15.4t/ha

• What is the annual investment allowance being reduced to for 2012/13?

£25,000

• In renewable energy, what does ‘FIT’ stand for?

Feed in tariff (i.e. £ per kilo watt fed in to the National Grid)

• Looking at the building used as a carpenters’ workshop, under what legislation could this tenant be protected?

Landlord & Tennant Act 1954

·         The machinery is our three main tractors that I have explained in more detail on other posts!

·         The Butterfly is: a Comma

Just to keep you on your toes here are a couple more questions…….

·         What is the main difference between a lease and a licence?

·         What is an individual’s capital gains tax annual exemption for 2011/12?

·         Describe 4 weeds or crop diseases common in this crop of winter Wheat?

·         Describe 4 HLS options and points available

·         Estimate the price of the following if bought today in a Supermarker (£/Kg or L)

British beef rump silver side joint £       /kg

British unsmoked back bacon £           /kg

Boned shoulder of lamb £         / kg

1 litre of semi skimmed milk £

(Supermarket brand) white sliced load of bread £

·         Estimate the livestock prices for the following sold off farm (p/kg Deadweight or L)

Finished steer cattle £      / kg 65kg fattened pig £       / kg Finished lamb £      / kg 1 litre fresh milk @ farm quota       p/L

Answers will follow once you have hd a chance to scratch your head!

Land of our Fathers in Westhorpe

On Fridy (20th April) in Westhorpe Village Hall at 7.30pm in aid of the New Village Hall Fund, a special veiwing of our DVD is being organised by local resident Phil Aldous. Ticket donations of £3/person can be booked on 07578336594, light refreshments will be avaliable during the showing.

Young Farmers’ Valuation Day

Winning Snr Team Hadleigh YFC With Sponsors Ensors & Lacy Scott and Knight

 A couple of weekends ago we hosted the Suffolk Young Farmers’ Farm Valuation day, this is an event for all the Suffolk clubs: senior, junior and associate members.  It is kindly sponsored by Ensors Accountants and Lacy Scott & Knight Land Agents.

This was the first year we have hosted the event and we were really interested to see what it was all about and also how we could put our own unique twist to this testing event.

The clubs enter teams of three members which are given questions on a number of areas of farm valuation and farming knowledge. This year the questions were based over 5 different areas: Machinery Valuation, Residential Property, Commercial Property & Accountancy, Species Identification and In-field Valuation.

Here are some example questions. See how you get on!

·     Calculate the cost of re-roofing the farmhouse roof (show your workings).

• In the context of residential property, what does ‘Ag Tag’ mean?
• Calculate a basic gross margin for this field, assuming the field is 20 ha (49 acres)
• Estimate the average wheat yields (t/acre or t/ha) :- World Average, UK Average, Lodge Farm, Westhorpe, World Record
• What is the annual investment allowance being reduced to for 2012/13?
• In renewable energy, what does ‘FIT’ stand for?
• Looking at the building used as a carpenters’ workshop, under what legislation could this tenant be protected?

·     Describe and Value this machines:

• Name this Butterfly:

The Young Farmers all seemed to have a great day, the junior members found it difficult but this will be addressed next year so they have their own set of questions, but one Junior team did get their own back by describing our machinery as slightly rusty!

On the day, the newly formed Hadleigh YFC team won the event with a very reasonable 101 out of 150, beating Bury St Edmunds by 2 points. This was the first competition that Hadleigh had entered after the club was formed the week before, so well done them. The winning junior team came from Gipping Valley with a score of 86.



Winning Jnr Team Gipping Valley YFC with Sponsors Ensors & Lasy Scott and Knight

Young Farmers is a great organisation for all ages from 10 -26. You or your child does not have to be from a farming background, just need to be interested in what goes on in the countryside and want to meet some like minded people. The clubs host a number of social events throughout the year as well as have competition events between them every few weeks. More info can be found at http://suffolkyoungfarmers.com/ or http://www.nfyfc.org.uk/ 

Farm Update

Spring has arrived and the sun is shining, however snow and sleet have been forecast for the Easter weekend!

Work on the farm has really kicked into action. We have had another unusually dry and warm winter and so the crops have been growing non stop. This has meant that the winter wheat sown in early September is very lush and already looks as you would expect at the end of April!  This is not necessarily a problem.  It just means that myself, Toby, our Crop Doctor, and Nick, the Spray Operator, need to be on the ball with monitoring crop disease and pests because in sunshine they really start to multiply while the plants rattle through the growth stages into summer.

To keep up with this rapid growth we have been applying Nitrogen fertiliser to the crops, which acts as a much needed plant food, making them strong so they don’t come under stress. The Oil Seed Rape is really growing fast.  You can drive past a field one day and then the next day you drive past again and immediately see the difference in height. This is due to the long roots picking up all the nitrogen there, which has been broadcast by us onto the soil, dissolved by rain and dews and picked up by the root system of the plants deep in the soil.

The spring crops of our Naked Oats, Grass Seed, Linseed and Spring Beans are now in the soil. They all went into very good seed beds and have benefited from the rain over that weekend but the Linseed is still waiting for some more life giving water (As I type the clouds are becoming dark, so fingers crossed the rain will be with us soon).

The Linseed was drilled with two demonstration tractors, as we are looking to change our Caterpillar tracked machine. It was drilled using the most up to date satellite navigation for farm vehicles. This means that the tractor follows the edge of its own worked area over the field and the accuracy is between 2-5cm. The driver does not have to steer, just has to remember to turn round at the end when the alarm sounds! This takes the responsibility off the driver to keep straight, which frees him up to concentrate on the implement that the tractor is pulling, so the applications are done much more sympathetically to the conditions of the field. It means that our fuel and seed bill will be reduced, as we will not be overlapping at all. It will be a costly investment but this reduction in our expenses will mean that the pay back will be relatively quick, as fuel prices are set to increase!

Also on the farm, we are having our annual spring clean and tidy up.  We have got a couple of big events on the horizon, so a tidy yard is called for. Work has also started on the installation of our new solar energy system. This we hope to be up and running in a couple of weeks, so that the majority of our daily electrical energy will be made up of home produced power.  

Spring is a busy time of year but it is a great time as the countryside greens and the wildflowers emerge. Rain is the key to unlocking these beautiful sights and maintaining our crops that currently, ‘touch wood’, look in good shape. We will see what the climate has to give us over the next few months.          BWB

What is that noise?

Well it has not been a nice week to be a dog owner! Flo my dog on two occasions found something to roll in which smelt very, very bad (we definitely have foxes as we have fox poo!) and we also had the unusual scenario nowadays of walking in driving rain!

The lack of water in our soil was hitting a crisis point and we are officially in a drought! Back in September when we were cleaning out a pond, we dug to 15ft and we found that the clay was bone dry down there and it just crumbled in your hand! What is ahead of us? Well, hose pipe bans will be enforced and industrial abstraction from rivers and bore holes will be under even tighter control. This is something that we as farmers have to consider, and all gardeners. Water butt sales have rocketed at our local DIY shop and everyone is preparing for another dry spring and summer. I’m a bit concerned as nature has a way of levelling itself out and being about a foot of rainfall short over the past two years, we think it may all come in a hurry!

Skylarks are singing

However, the rain in the last week has dampened the topsoil and it has slowly worked its way through the soil profile, hopefully to be held in our clay subsoil to benefit us if we do get a dry spring. On one of my dog walks, I heard an unusual noise amongst the chorus of Skylarks and other farmland birds. A noise I had not heard for a while - actually over a year I reckon. One of our land drains was running full bore and it was flowing into a wet ditch! The sound of running water is a common sound in the average year but the last two have been far from average. All our fields have been drained to allow the rainwater to escape out of our clay-based topsoil so that the plants growing do not stand in waterlogged soil, creating an anaerobic soil condition that plants do not like - unless it is rice in a paddy field! Our fields all have clay or plastic pipes set deep in the profile that use natural falls of the ground to run the water to the nearest ditch. The ditch is then used as the transport and storage system to move this water down the river system and out to sea. It is important to maintain the ditches by cleaning them out on a regular basis, as you don’t want your drain outlets to be standing underwater, for this defeats the object of the drain, because water then backs up in the soil. Wet spots in the field give us the heads up if there is a problem with the drains and we then consult the correct drainage map showing the underground pipes so that we can identify the blocked drain or buried outlet pipe. In the winter, John does a great job at cleaning the ditches; scraping the side of the ditch to prevent slumping and removing the silt built up by water movement and leaf litter. The spoil is left to dry out on the ditch top and then it will be spread out in the field and so farmed in the next year.

Ditches are important wildlife habitats with their grass sides and wet bottoms but like everything we do, farming must come first as this brings in the money. Any environmental work has to be balanced against this, so we only carry out work like ditch clearing when the minimal stress on the wildlife will be caused.  It is detrimental in the short term to the habitat, so normally, with wildlife management, it is little and often but ditches are usually all done then left until maintenance is required again. This could be 5-10 years depending on the amount of water that flows through.

Essential Ditch management

Other water management we undertake on the farm is rain harvesting, we have been collecting rain water off one of our buildings to supplement the spray water for a few years, but in the next year we will be installing 4 giant water butts, so that all our water for the sprays applied to the crops will come from the heavens and not the mains!

But having said all this, one thing we do need to make all this work worthwhile and allow us to grow our crops healthy and strong is rain! We are short, and fresh water is a resource we really need to start conserving on the farm. Our ponds are low; the Great Crested Newts will be coming out of hibernation to find dry or shrunken ponds which will affect their breeding. Please do not be tempted to fill your garden pond with mains water. This is not a good idea for natural wildlife, due to the levels of unusual elements in the mains water after it has been cleaned. We will just have to wait for the levels to rise and the ponds to fill up on their own. Prayers and rain dances may be required but only if you make sure it stays dry while we are ready to harvest our crops come July, August and September!

I’m glad that we do have one full pond in the yard still, as it came in handy when I needed to make Flo swim after she came back smelling so bad!     BWB

Wild on Wednesdays

Last week was my turn to contribute to Lesley Dolphin's afternoon show on BBC Radio Suffolk. To hear the piece go to 1hr 55.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00p3jr4/Lesley_Dolphin_29_02_2012/

Lots of topics covered this week from the Suffolk Agricultural Association conference to lambing, ponds, hedge cutting, young people in agriculture and Buzzards.