Archived News

27th October 2011

With a few staff away this week, Sam’s been looking after young stock and keeping an eye on the Galloways, Luke spent a couple of hours each morning feeding the older cattle and David and Ed have been on arable work and that's been a complete nightmare for them.

Contractors harvested the hemp seed for Goodoil a couple of weeks ago. The seed will go to Devon where the culinary oil will be physically pressed from the seed. Gravity is used to filter the oil; solids settle at the bottom and pure oil is siphoned off the top. This ancient technique creates the most natural oil.

The stems were left standing in the field for a fortnight to allow the retting process; micro-organisms and moisture dissolve or rot away much of the tissues and pectins surrounding the fibre and allowing its separation from the stems. The retting process is used in flax and hemp fibre production.

The stems needed to be cut and baled in dry weather and the contractors haven’t yet finished so that will affect out our autumn sowing. GOODoil are sending their hemp straw bales to Hemp Technology in East Anglia to be developed into insulation products and horse bedding.

The intention was for David and Ed to cultivate and drill wheat in the fields cleared of hemp bales.  However the rakes and balers used by the contractors are having problems picking up all the hemp straw, leaving behind more chaff than expected. 

This has caused huge headaches with the cultivator (Ed) and even more problems with the drill (David). The drill has 50 coulter legs that place the seed inches into the soil; these legs are catching the hemp straw which is wrapping around the legs and blocking the coulters, stopping the seed from going into the soil. 

David is spending more time unblocking the seed drill than actually sowing the seed and it's extremely frustrating. Over the last few days they have managed to drill  64 acres where they’d normally drill 100 - 150 acres per day. In September 187 acres of wheat was drilled at Shalford in a day.

Tomorrow we’ll begin ploughing around Coomb Farm to see whether the hemp straw can be buried to allow the drilling to speed up. However, ploughing itself is slow and uses a lot of diesel. Despite these delays we are just 15 hectares behind baler which is delayed by rain.

Tony Leach from East Surrey started to lift fodder beet for us.  This is another painfully slow process due to the very dry soil conditions over recent months and not helped enough by the rain of the last few days.

Four loads were lifted on Tuesday (about 40 tonnes from 1.5 acres) and three loads on Wednesday. Yields seem to be good, with large clean beets being lifted and transported to Churchfield where we should be able to store about 150 tonnes with the balance at Paddington.  The fodder will feed cattle overwinter and we may sell some of it.