Brett Vale Farming Diary - September 2026
You may recall at the end of August we were praying for rain. Well, it did rain over the bank holiday weekend (apologies to the Lindsey Red Rose Beer Festival!) and we managed to plant some oilseed rape. However, the moisture also made a nice job of making the ‘volunteer cereals’ (losses from the combine) grow, as well as some weeds. This is good news, as it means we can spray these off with a herbicide pre-drilling next year’s crop, giving us the cleanest possible start.
It also meant we could start our autumn ploughing campaign, as the ground had been far too hard until now. Ploughing an area, instead of using the non-inversion tillage that we had been doing, is an excellent risk management tool against the weather. It is slow and expensive, but relatively fail-safe.
Wednesday, the 9th September was the NFU’s Back British Farming Day; hopefully this didn’t pass you by. As a county, we decided that this would be a good opportunity to engage with our newly elected county councillors, so invited them to Brett Vale for a farm tour. It was well received by them and has sparked conversations about how they can help our industry in Suffolk. We enjoyed a BBQ of local produce from The Crown at Bildeston. We look forward to getting together for regular round-table meetings with them going forward.
The following week, we started planting barley and wheat in lovely conditions. However, this changed quickly with more unseasonably dry and warm weather, and Suffolk seems to be resembling a desert once again. Our earliest planted cereals are up and look well, but some will now need rain before they emerge further. The lack of rain has forced us into stopping drilling for now, a difficult decision when the weather is so pleasant.
Back to the oilseed rape… it went in, it came up and then it came under attack! The local population of cabbage stem flea beetle has set about feasting on it and, coupled with the dry weather, it is struggling. It somehow seems to improve week on week but, with no reasonable control of this with chemicals or otherwise, it is a tough watch. You’ll see from the pictures a plant with lots of holes in that has been eaten by them, and then an area of the field that has suffered less damage.
So once again the end of the month is seeing us hoping for rain so we can get on with our autumn jobs.
Oliver Pratt, September 2026