NFU Harvest Report 2008

Harvest stretches on, well into the second half of September now. This late in the year instead of harvesting wheat crops, most farmers would have been expecting to have ploughed, cultivated and made seedbeds ready for planting next year's cereal crops. At best they are scrabbling to catch up after weeks of delay and for many many famers a large proportion of the past year's wheat crops remain in the ground - where they have been for around 11 months now.

Around 30% of the wheat crop is estimated as remaining uncut with farmers having made much better progress over the past few days, although not in all areas. Most winter barley and oilseed rape that is not yet cut is limited to the North of England with the last remaining patches of these crops being picked up during gaps in the weather. Progress through wheat has been very limited in this part of England. Large parcels of wheat remain in all regions or England and Wales, some winter beans have now been cut - mainly when it was not possible to work on wheat.

 With better weather forecast for the days ahead we anticipate good harvest progress this week, although ground conditions remain very challenging for Members particularly in counties bordering the river Severn and those in the top end of the North East.

Some individual farmers and localities were hit hard by last week's bad weather. There remains a very unusual variation in progress across and within regions, with parts of the South of England with one third of the wheat crop standing in the field still but parts of the North East and East Midlands largely finished. Good progress has been made in the east of East Anglia, but less so in western parts of the region. While certain parts of the East Midlands and Yorkshire are finished or nearly finished but conditions remain atrocious for a large number of farmers in Wales and bordering counties, northern parts of Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland.

A good deal of land work has taken place over previous weeks in preparation for wheat crops following oilseed and barley. Some have planted a large percentage of their oilseed rape crop (after wheat already harvested) for next year's harvest but with soil conditions still fairly wet after last week's rain much of the recent cultivation has been limited to ploughing, and even that has not been possible on some clay soils. Time is running out to prepare seedbeds and establish some varieties of oilseed rape now, and farmers have been preparing back-up cropping plans in case it proves too costly to establish as much winter cropping as they had planned.

East Anglia

Very little wheat was harvested before Sunday, when combines resumed progress through fairly wet crops at around 17% moisture on Tuesday after a few dry days. The second half of the wheat harvest has been taking a lot of getting, but estimates are now put at 80% cut to date (still less than 70% for many producers in the west, over 90% complete in eastern parts of the region, with most finished there), all at mostly between 16% 18% and up 20% and well over in terms of moisture content. Progress is much better this week and by Friday growers expect to have knocked a large hole in what remains of the crop. Sprouting has been seen and bushel weight has begun to suffer within a lot of the crops harvested in September, fortunately crops are standing and have not begun to collapse significantly. In almost all other years in memory, 100% of the whole region's cereal crop would have been harvested by the end of August. Farmers have taken the most valuable crops first, and milling quality for remaining crops is very unlikely to have survived. During damper periods farmers have also been harvesting winter beans, and ploughing for next years crops and some cases have managed to plant much of their oilseed rape crop for next harvest, on days too wet for combining.

For next year's crops oilseed rape planting and even cultivation for cereal crops has been very limited. Cropping plans are being revisited with oilseed and wheat plantings likely to decline at the expense of winter barley and break crops like winter beans.