Soapbox – The contract of doom

When, in March this year, I sold 300 tonnes of milling wheat at £170 for first week of August movement I was rather pleased with myself. It seemed a good price, the crops looked in decent shape in the field, so what could possibly go wrong? In hindsight rather a lot went wrong.

As the end of July approached and the wheat started to look fit, the weather turned a bit apocalyptic. Those summer showers, which normally go round north-east Essex, suddenly started to make a bee line for us to the point it started to feel decidedly vindictive. We didn’t get just a bit of rain, we got inches of it.

So it was time to fire up the drier which had lain idle for a couple of years thanks to dry harvests. As the drive trace creaked into action there was a loud bang as mangled metal and fractured sprockets rendered the machine kaput. A frantic phone call to the manufacturer revealed something along the lines that the only remaining spares were in a warehouse just outside Bratislava and due to a shortage of hauliers the only way they would be on the farm by Christmas was if I fetched them myself which would probably mean two weeks in COVID quarantine.

Meanwhile, just to rub salt in the wound, that £170 a tonne price that looked rather rosy in March was starting to look very unimpressive as the spot price soared to over £200. The long and short of it was failure to deliver was going to cost an eye watering £10,000 in defaults. It’s at times like these where I start to lose my marbles by wishing the grain price to fall.

Mercifully my luck started to turn. A rather excellent firm called Master Farm Services of Bures had a batch drier I could immediately hire. With that machine duly parked in the grainstore, by the last days of July it was time to bite some wheat. The problem was I found I wasn’t so much biting the rubbed-out grain, I was sucking on it. It was about as ‘al dente’ as porridge.

But with the threat of a £10,000 default hanging over our heads, we duly fired up the CX to see what could be stolen from the field. I hate harvesting wet wheat with a passion. It doesn’t flow, it looks terrible, it gets hot in the heap overnight and when you look at the yield meter in the combine cab, you realise the main reason the yield looks impressive is that it’s being inflated by water you’ve then got to get rid of at the expense of a lot of diesel.

But to its credit, the 12-tonne cooking pot Masters had promptly provided didn’t blink at the task. As the steam rose so did my optimism that I might actually meet the contract of doom I had signed several months earlier. I also regained my sanity by realising it wasn’t actually in my interest for the grain price to crash. I also concluded the old kaput drier, which had literally caused me many sleepless nights over the years, should be sent to the scrapyard in the sky and a batch drier was the order of the day.

So overall harvest 2021 proved a stressful, catchy and expensive affair. Yields were decidedly disappointing. Although the crops from the combine seat looked heavy with plenty of big ears, the yield meter seldom flashed up into the eights or nines and all too often was at sixes and sevens, just like the driver.

The post-harvest wash up with the agronomist concluded lack of sunlight in June was probably the main cause. In hindsight I should have taken his advice to use more fungicide early on but in the drought of April my penny pinching had come to the fore, which probably left the crops vulnerable to disease as the weather turned wet in May and June.

The good news is what we’ve lost on the yield roundabouts, we’ve gained on the market swings. The bottom line is harvest 2021 has proven profitable. I hope yours proved or is proving the same.