Time to put racquet away as spring beckons
The best thing to be said about this last winter, aside from spending some quality time with the family, is that it has allowed me to indulge in two of my passions, writes Tim Cooke.
The first is tennis. Odd, I know, for the winter, but I am an arable farmer, so court-time in the summer is hard to find. The second is skiing and I was fortunate to have a few days away with some good friends skiing under blue skies. Great fun.
When we flew back into Heathrow we could see just how much land was either under water from swollen rivers or water just lying in huge pools.
Having land on a flood plain myself, I do have a bit of experience of what it is like to go through when your farmland disappears under water but I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to have the whole of your farm and yard under water for not just days, but weeks on end.
The devastation and loss will be hard to repair and my sympathies go out to all those farmers involved.
It is hard to imagine that fellow farmers in Queensland, Australia, are suffering the exact opposite, having had no significant rainfall for two years, with livestock dying at a rate of 10,000 per day. Rainfall is something we have certainly not lacked for the last four months.
With the days getting longer and crops beginning to awaken it's a sign that spring is in the air. It will be nice to see the machines back out in the field with the busy months ahead.
The new Kuhn fertiliser spinner is hooked up and ready to go so we can apply some nitrogen to later drilled winter wheat and the more backward oil seed rape crops.
The spinner is new for this season and it will be interesting to see how well it performs. It uses electronic mass control to determine the application rate so there is no need for a static calibration, as it measures the density of the fertiliser on the hydraulically driven discs. It also has the advantage of weigh cells and is operated by GPS for section control.
A new system I have put in place over winter is the ability for us to use the Gatekeeper crop recording program web application. This essentially makes Gatekeeper mobile by being able to view and complete application plans, stock levels and field records on either a smartphone or tablet.
All the spray and fertiliser records will be completed this way now.
Once data is completed and exchanged with the server all records are up to date, so there will not be the endless amounts of paperwork floating around the tractor cabs.
* Tim Cooke is an arable farmer near Telford
