From Sweden to Scotland…
At the time of writing this it has been nigh on 2 months since I have seen a spot of rain, though admittedly 4 weeks of that I spent in Africa. As you can imagine, this is starting to have an impact on some crops over here in the UK they are starting to show signs of stress due to lack of water. Hopefully we will see some rain soon but it will soon be too late for some of the winter wheat and yields will be impacted. My wife even spotted a combine working last week in some winter barley, which is early even for us!
Recently, I spent a day or two in Sweden attending the Borgeby Field Days and also meeting with our distributor for that area Datalogisk who also had a stand there. The event is not too dissimilar to the Cereals show that Dave King visited a few weeks ago but on a slightly smaller scale. Having said that, Borgeby’s visitor numbers were up again this year to well over 14,000 in two days, which is a new record for this event. I suspect the warm and sunny weather played a part in this though!
One of the nice things about this event was the live demonstrations of various equipment such as seed drills, cultivators and combine harvesters. The organisers had to desiccate the barley crop two weeks prior to the event so the harvesters could run through it, but nonetheless if gave people an idea of what they were capable of.
At the other end of the scale, the Sampo Rosenlew 2065. This is a Finnish built machine.
It was quite interesting see these machines all working away, especially when they all started off down the field at the same time!
Since then, I have managed to spend more than just a few days at home for a change. During this time, I have been to visit some customers and also fitted a yield monitor kit to a grower who has been trialling the OptRx sensors for us. Once they could see what the potential for real-time VRA nitrogen, they made the decision to buy a yield monitor to help verify the results. I think there a lot of people looking forward to seeing the results of the OptRx wheat trials, including myself.
Thankfully we have also had some rain. It had been 57 days since I had actually seen the rain and what a welcome sight it was! I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in places that have very little rainfall. But it has also come just in time for my working holiday – volunteering for the National Trust for Scotland. Hopefully the rain will cease by then!