Alpaca update and is it time to give up drilling wheat for 2020 harvest?

welcome to a new edition of Harry's farm, a bit of a sad day today, I'm afraid we're with the

alpaca

s, these are the Packers boys, we've got two sets of our Packers, we're keeping the girls and boys separated by obvious reasons and these. It's the boys and they have the fire in the meadow next to the house and yesterday I noticed that one of them was lying down away from the herd, which indicates that something is not quite right and it was Cuff Burt, who was the main stallion when we got the first

time

. We first had our Packers in 2004, so we had them for quite a while.

He was five years old, so we voted at 15 years old. We had it here five years ago. He was 20, so yeah, a reasonable range. age for an

alpaca

yesterday he fell we covered tri-tip a good heat we gave him extra food but he was just old age and he died overnight I just put him on the back of the serious and he fell he stopped like this we They depend a lot on the local hunting, they catch the downed cattle as it's called and you pay £50 and they remove them so it's just a service to local cattle owners in the vicinity of a local hunter getting rid of their dead cattle , just say about last week we got them really just for the house palette.

I like them a lot, since Aníbal has had them, you know, cattle, sheep, etc., now Paco, my farmer friends make fun of me a little for having them there. I earn them as garden ornaments. I just like them. As an animal, this is Barney, he is quite tame because, like Correa, who unfortunately lost an eye, he was not ours at the

time

, we bought him when he was about a year old and he really is a quite tame alpaca because he has been hand-raised and he's a little blind so he always has to look closer anyway, he's not used to our Packers, they get a little terrified because he always comes bounding towards you, but only because he saw nearsighted and any closer look, so it's a real family favorite and he just brings the other one with them and I like them because they can live outside, you can put up a field shelter and they're not particularly interested.

I mean, they originally come from the Andes and a British winter doesn't seem like a test. them at all and they also like cameras so yeah most of these are home raised and live a while on this committee. I have llamas too, llamas are much bigger and have a bit of a reputation for spitting and have just been a little angry. I prefer alpacas, they are smaller animals, friendlier, more curious, it is pleasant to have them around. I'll take him hunting. It's a 15 mile drive from here. Go do that and then we'll take a tour of the farm. and see what else has been happening at Harry's Far.

I have come to take a look at the first week that is not on the local farm on this other block here and it is great if it looks like a normal field of winter

wheat

, a first

wheat

like I explained before is a crow, the wheat that is planted after a B interim crop, that rapeseed or in our case winter linseed, it could be peas, it could be beans, and this is the one that typically gets its biggest yield, so it's your most prized item.

harvest

on the farm actually and we have rows, this was all shot right before the holidays on October 31st, December 20th today, so it's been in the ground, I saw BAM, seven weeks, isn't it November and a little of December? and it looks good, everything is there. everything is arising.

I wouldn't expect more growth than this at this point. They will start to grow, so a single stick will appear and then another stem will appear. Here another sheet. I'm looking to see if I can see. any herbicide, yeah you probably can't see it unless you get up close and see it as a weed there and it's dying, it's absorbed by the herbicide, it was killed when it went through the soil so that's a great sign and basically it looks free of weeds, so with winter wheat, this wheat is already done. We planted it 50 first, so we sprayed it a few days later and we really won't be back here until March. the first fertilizer with something like that I'm just saying it's very windy today we're going to fight the conditions to publish this report but if there's a little bit of wind noise I apologize now let's go and take a look next door where the flaxseed of winter is gains on seeds looking good here, all the rows are popping up, but what's really good to see if your farm is there, you can see we've sprayed the volunteers, this was barley litters and weeds grown. you'll see they're completely dying, he looked down the road as their yellowing effect and the green rows of flaxseed now really started the show as the body dies out thanks for the herbicide we put on it was about half shy, it's quite a herbicide of long action to get the effect, but that's good, that's where you want to see, let's go back to the home farm, see what's going on there, well, this is the problem, the winter wheat field has a lot of stoning and we've had this.

Steady rain, if you've been watching Harry's farm you'll know how stupidly wet it's been this year. October and November were both a couple hundred percent, well above 200 percent of the long-term average precipitation, which December looks like. Same thing again, this is the wettest part of the field, we're right at the top, here we're not in the valley where those buns were, where you expect to find water at the top and standing water here, but the wheat. m I'm surprised how you still make an effort to come up and see it here, I mean it didn't come in in very good condition but that weed is still doing its best to grow even though it's underwater right now but I've lost .

I'm guessing this field is only 14 acres, so it's probably five or six acres that aren't going to be

harvest

able here. We tried to drill a little more. I'm worried about this windy weather. In fact, listen to me, we tried to drill a little deeper. We have about ten acres there that we put into a 60 acre field and we just gave up, so we had a little bit more, maybe all to go into a little bit of shade and I'll just show you that bit of field there and here, the fields that we have not managed to plant this fall, this winter and winter wheat, and they are starting to show a little.

Sorry, it's very frustrating that we haven't managed to have more winter. wheat on the farm because this is the worst case scenario because we sprayed it in a roundup in October hoping we could continue

drilling

winter wheat so we actually ended up with the best doubles during the winter and that's not what I want to do for the health of the soil because it's the worms and the microbes that want a growing crop, some sort of vegetation to live on and this becomes a bit sterile, all the nutrients leach out of the soil so it's deeply frustrating as a farmer We're done with this kind of thing.

We are going to get more winter wheat this season. Well, I don't know, certainly not, because I can. We are absolutely afraid of the last few blows and looking at it I can see that actually this season. You could end up not farming on this land and you could put in a cover crop and a cover crop could be anything from turnip stubble that you would then put into sheep. They are naturally fertilizing the soil, as they do everything you put in with clovers. and that adds a little bit of nitrogen, but it's all about getting the soil microbes or the operational worms that are chewing on things to convert the dead matter in the soil, etc., it's just about keeping the heart in the soil so it's a crop.

We're not actually going to combine, but in the end, before we start doing it next year, we'll either fill it out or we can just grow it, spray it and cultivate it, so it's a cover crop that you won't harvest. At the end of the year, looking at the budgets, I think if we put in a spring buffer, everyone will get spring barley because I haven't seen the latest figures for winter wheat planting, but I expect we'll probably hit around 50% of Whidden, the planned winter wheat that was expected to be drilled in 2000 and 1920 has not been drilled and we are all in this boat, what do we plot?

We try to get winter wheat or wait and put in spring barley. I think there will be a rush with spring barley. I don't think there will be any profit in the end because everyone is involved and it is a very easy market to oversupply, but if I put in a cover crop, then then I started for harvest in well 21, so I drilled in September

2020

, October 2024 into a winter wheat there and then it becomes a first wheat because it's after a catch crop, if I have a cover crop that's what a rapeseed or linseed is, so I end up with a higher yielding first wheat in 2021, so you could sacrifice the

2020

crop in the hope of a better 2021 crop and that's what farming is all about.

You know, we made a profit in 2019, we broke even in 2018. Before that, we had four years of losses and farming is unpredictable, you are a challenge, you know the conditions, the weather and what it throws at you, and you have to adopt a long-term vision, you try to look seven years ahead. average is what I'm looking for, so maybe 2020 isn't the harvest we all hope for, but 2021 will be even better than I expect, who knows anyway, so here's what's happening on Harry's farm. I would have liked to have been a little more positive, let's hope that in January 2020 the sun comes out, we have those frosts, we have those beautiful winter days and everything dries up and everything will be fine thanks for watching and subscribing, you need big numbers, I appreciate it I really appreciate if you want to touch that notification too, that would be fantastic.

I'll be making more videos when the new year comes and hopefully the sun will shine, so thanks for watching.