12th December 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: Known unknowns
The news that this year’s harvest area for UK oilseed rape was the lowest figure since 1983 has made rather grim reading. Given the crop was still in its introductory phase on most arable farms in…
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21st October 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: Blue or red?
There was an old adage that did the rounds, that UK agriculture was better off under a Labour government than a Tory one. Like many pearls of wisdom, it didn’t stand up to much analysis,…
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26th September 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: Watch this space
My father was one of those post-war farmers where the success of the crop was determined by what you did before you sowed the seed, as opposed to what you did to the crop afterwards.…
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27th August 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: No profiting from perversity
I know I’m not the only one who won’t remember 2025 for its benign weather. The scale of this meteorological adversity is neatly illustrated by the accompanying image of my neighbour’s maize…
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28th July 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: Timeless charm of the tented field
One suspects crowds of folk have been occasionally gathering in farmed fields for as long as there have been farmed fields. In times past, the causes of such al fresco occasions could be manifold – from…
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26th June 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: Seedy speed dating
Visiting Cereals 2025 in Lincolnshire found me in a nostalgic mood – it’s a sobering thought that in 2029 the event will be fifty years old. That’s presuming its appearance on Clarkson’s Diddly Squat Farm…
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21st May 2025
Smith’s Soapbox: Owls of delight
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11th October 2024
Smith’s Soapbox: Of naturists and naturalists
Being a coastal farm brings benefits and burdens – it means you get more wind and less rain as storm clouds rush to the magnetic attraction of the sea. So in September, while the English…
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21st September 2024
Smith’s Soapbox: Behold the flatliners
It’s a pensive moment to be writing in CPM magazine on its 25th birthday – a quarter of a century is a notable passage of time. It used to be the definition of ‘a generation’…
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15th August 2024
Smith’s Soapbox: St. Margarets field under new holy orders
Harvest 2024 is erased from the fields but probably not from the memory, for all the wrong reasons. The record wet that fell in both the autumn and winter left its scars – cereals don’t like…
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24th July 2024
Smith’s Soapbox: A PTSD-conditioned harvest
I once read that to claim to have lived a full farming life, a farmer should see first-hand at least fifty harvests. I’d guess I’m far from alone in that given I was handed harvest…