Farming Talk – December 10
Not a lot has changed in politics, weather, and farming.
Politics is in a mess and I don’t think a general election will change things. The weather is still from one extreme to the other. Shropshire regularly has flooding of the Severn around Melverley, but never hits the news with thousands of acres under water every year. An uncle of mine farmed in this area and I remember him saying that they always had three floods a year and had to cope with whatever they had.
My cousin now farms the land and this year the farm was flooded in early June which wiped out most of his spring cropping and ruined his silage ground and he had to house the cattle for a couple of weeks – quite devastating for him and many farmers along the Severn valley.
It's instances like this that many farmers up and down the country have to face and can be devastating financially and mentally to some. Most are very resilient and do whatever they can do to survive.
Fortunately we don’t flood on our farm to that scale, and we started planting wheat on September 20 and got a lot of crops off to a good start before the weather changed.
Richard Savage
