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Dave heads up our estate maintenance team, and is currently involved in the refurbishment of many of our redundant buildings. He joined us nearly as long ago as Mr T but not quite. when he joined there were over 30 people working on the estate in roles from estate maintenance, tractor driving, pig men, dairy men, workshop fitters, wood men and a large number of office staff. Dave was one of a 3 man team when he started on the maintenance team. They were originally involved in putting up many of the farm buildings that he is now refurbishing.
Dave also known as Mr M (we're good with are nick names aren't we!) and Mr T both love thier motor sport, and when they met here this common hobby made them good friends. They both used to go off with thier kids supporting them in thier motor sports and they still go off together and get involved, Mr M is a scrutineer for the stock car circuit and has a reputation for his consistent attention to detail.
In the summer Mr M can been seen in the middle of the night driving our combine around, the two of us usually do the night shift which means that we keep the combine going for a few extra hours each night without the main operator getting over tired. Its never an aim of ours to be the last set of lights working the fields in harvest, however from our vantage point on top of the downs we often get the chance to see who's still going, when we call it quits at some stupid times in the morning.
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Robert is my Dad and from here on in he shall be called so. Dad came back to work on the farm just about as soon after finishing at Shuttleworth College of agriculture as he could. To begin with he spent a good deal of his time working in the mill and mix plant that we used to have at plantation farm, according to Mum he used to be up there at all hours of the day and night running the machinery up there. I never saw the plant, and from all accounts I'm glad of it it is said that the reason he spent so much time up there is because no one else could handle the job.
Dad has been the managing director of the farm since 1982 (ish) and has been responsible for many great things here. He has brought over 1000 acres in his time. It has been his mission to grow the arable potential of these bits of land since he brought them. Often this meant moving some of the hedges that split the parcels of land over to the edge of the field. This is an act that brought much ridicule from the locals at the time. But Dad stuck to his guns, and I'm glad that he did, he has great vision that allows him to see what stuff will look like when he's finished with it, and now that these hedges have been successfully moved the land is both practical in an arable sense and beautiful and rejuvenated in an environmental sense. Dad is still using his powers of long term vision. He is applying them to the property on the estate, as he reconditions the various buildings around the estate he is doing so with a view of what they might be in the future as well as the present. Dad's approach is what sparked the phrase 'growing potential' that I use as a tag line for the estate, because that is exactly what he has been doing all his time in charge.
On the rare occasion that Dad is not busy on the farm he goes sailing on his boat Merhonour which is currently moored at the Hamble river, this boat is known as a trailer sailor because when he gets bored of the Solent he can pick it up plonk it on a trailer behind his land-rover and take it somewhere different, Spain for example, or Scotland, or even Ireland. Mum and Dad have recently brought a house in the south of France with a small vineyard the plan is that they will spend a pleasant bit of time out there and I'm jealous!
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Dave otherwise known as Mr T has been kicking about the farm for ages, he's worked with my Grandad, my Dad and now Me. Dave's seen this place change in massive ways and rumour has it he's been here so long that he saw the first tractor arrive on the farm. Mr T has loads of interesting stories about those good old days that people talk of. Many lengthy conversations can be had about them.
Mr T has embraced modern agriculture with ease and enjoys the challenge of driving some of the most up-to-date machinery in the industry. Take his favorite machine the bateman sprayer, Dave delights at the opportunity to show people this marvel "four different screens in that thing" he tells them. Its true its packed loads of the things, one for turning the booms of at exactly the right place, another for keeping the booms the correct height off the ground accross its 30 meter span, and another just so that he can see whats happening behind him. Dave is the main machinery operator and carries out all of the winter, spring and summer farming tasks including all the drilling, most of the spraying, and liquid fertiliser application.
When not at work Dave spends a lot of time working with his son Mark on his banger racing cars, they travel all around the country driving their cars into other cars in a desperate mission to get to the finish line before anybody else. He also enjoys going on road trips with his wife down to his birthplace of Sussex.
 
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welcome to our new website |
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welcome to the first kingsclere estates web site today is the first day of for the site and I'm very excited about the future of it. I'm particularly looking forward to filling in this blog page spending time chatting about what I'm up-to on the estate, and hopefully entering into some colourful debates about the merits of my actions. I really want this to be an interactive page and welcome anybody to make any comments, even if they have not been mentioned on the blog so far a comment left on the blog page will create i hope develop an open conversation for everybody to enjoy and learn from. So please feel free to fire away with any questions or comments...
until then I'm going to use the next few blogs to introduce our team, I'm going to do this in age order so that no one is offended because they have not been the first mentioned, of are the last mentioned or are some where lost in the middle!
I hope you enjoy your reading happy blogging..
Tim
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First day of the 2007 harvest campaign |
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Today is the day that is of great importance to arable farmers because we started our harvest for the year. I like to call it a campaign, because from a management point of view that’s what it feels like, the start of harvest is a sign that the countryside is about to become a hive of activity for as soon as the crop is taken of the ground work starts almost immediately to prepare the ground for the next growing season.
We have already decided what we are going to grow, and where we are going to grow it, this is largely dictated to us by mother nature, we try to grow as much wheat as we can, but in order to keep the levels of pests and disease to a manageable level we rotate the field that are going to grow wheat. Here we grow wheat on half the farm so that means alternating between wheat and another crop each year.
We have a selection of other crops that we can grow to give us a break from wheat. Oil Seed rape is one of our favoured options because as well as there being a good market for it the crop helps the structure of the soil to improve, it has a main root that grows like a carrot, or a turnip and that root helps to loosen the soil around it when the crop dies away. The thing about Oil seed rape is that it needs to be grown no closer than every 4 years, this means that 25% of our farm can go to oil seed rape, this leaves us with a further 25% of the farm to grow another break crop on, at the moment we are growing oats and beans.
After the crop has been harvested there is an amount of debris and weed seed left on the stubble, the idea is that we need to get as many of these weeds growing, as quick as possible after harvest so that we can kill them off before planting the next crop. There are a range of options available for me to chose from to do this the most efficiently.
- I could cultivate the ground to produce a Chit ( the first stage of plant growth) then wait until there is a good amount of weed plants on the ground, and spray the field off with a desiccant.
- I could look at the season and decide that there is enough moisture around that a chit will occur with out needing to do any thing. Then I can wait for six weeks or so and spray off before harvest.
- Or I could get a chit, then use a cultivator to dislodge the young weed seedlings and hopefully kill them. From the outset this seams to be a good idea, a way of reducing the use of chemicals. I use this method where appropriate but there are some other effects to consider.
1. The more time that I spend going up and down with a cultivator the more times I disturb the soil life. Each time I cultivate the ground I could be killing as much as 15-20% of the earth worm population, and as earth worms are a natural cultivator and pest controller I want to preserve as many of the slimy things as I can.
2. The time it takes to cultivate a field over spraying it is a big difference. To cultivate 120 acres (50 hectare’s) would take one man and a 270 horsepower tractor 15 hours. To spray that same field takes one man and a 200 horsepower sprayer 1 ½ - 2 hours.
3. The effectiveness of the weed control. This system only really works if there is a long period of dry soil to prevent the disturbed seedlings from setting their roots again.
With the crop removed it is also a good opportunity for me to add any nutrient’s that the next crop will need this is primarily potash and phosphate, but there are a range of products that I can use to make this available to the plant. I’ll talk about this another time…
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