That is very good news! Excited to vote for a crop.. Is the only option oats or would it be possible to sow barley, rye or anything else, seed availability permitting of course..? 😃

Dear Grahame

Please send my email to other members of the group.

Best

TonyA

@johncherry are there any heritage grains that would be suitable to plant?

With this second vote are we still going to be choosing between on companion cropping options?

@lucybradley1 @johncherry I would also like to know if we have any heritage grain options or is the only alternative to the wheat, oats?

Slightly embarassing, but we've been flat out this week with planting stuff and calving cows etc and I haven't really focussed on alternative crops. I'm waiting to hear back about some spring rye seed that may be available and don't know if there's any heritage options (as Steven says above, most heritage wheats are winter sown), so we'll delay the vote for a day or two so that we can be sure what we're voting for is actually feasible (and hope spring spelt materialises...we've had a few false dawns wih it so far). It's a pity, the ground is drying out beautifully in this lovely weather, the barley we sowed last week is up on the row already.

@johncherry of course, I understand.. Spring is a busy time on the farm! Spring rye sounds interesting.. Rye is very popular with bakeries, especially artisanal ones.. Good to delay the voting until you are sure of what's available.. It's good news about the warm dry weather.. 👍 😃

@nikireynolds and @johncherry. Thanks for your thoughts and glad to hear things are going well at the farm. I'll keep an eye out for updates re: spring rye over the next few days.

With apologies for the delay, we're still sniffing out alternatives to the three options already discussed and will post what you can vote on tomorrow.

20170403 Would it be possible to show automatically the date that a message is posted on this string? Or should we - GRAHAME - enter a date of origin ourselves?

Thank you JOHN for finding time for the Ourfield activity despite the multiple pressures of spring.

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One of the lessons we have learned is the constraint/opportunity of winter v spring varieties.

If we are to continue next year - as I very much hope we shall - we should already be thinking of next year and the rotation options, as well as our goals. The latter include weed suppression, soil enhancement, financial returns, transaction costs, etc.

Apropos transaction costs I am very anxious that all the transaction costs are being borne by John. Ideally we should capture them and make sure they are in the accounts.

On my part sitting at a screen is exceptionally unstressful. All one does is ask questions and reveal a low level of knowledge. Voting is definitely fun.

Hi all. I have been meaning to type this up for a week or so (and maybe it is better to wait until we know what we’re growing) but I had the time today, so here it is :)

I heard back from three of the mills I contacted in March – all were very keen to hear about the project - and they told me the following:

Wicken mill http://www.nationalmillsweekend.co.uk/pages_wind/wicken.htm

This small community mill was restored a few years ago and has gradually increased production to 7-8 tonnes last year. They are not electric so are reliant on the power of the wind.

They currently buy their organic grain from http://www.hammondsendfarm.co.uk/ who seem to supplier the smaller traditional mills (and e5 bakehouse). They order grain in 2-3 tonne batches (a trailer load) for £500 a tonne. They are not certified organic so cannot sell their flour as such.

They would be happy to try some of our non-organic grain, if the crop is a good quality, either by a) buying and milling to sell the flour themselves, or b) milling the flour for us for a fee. They can send us a quote if we were interested in option b.

Brixton mill http://www.brixtonwindmill.org/

They also buy from Hammonds End Farm but on a smaller scale - £11.25 for a 25kg sack. Last year was the first year they milled anything (just 750kg of wheat and barley) as they have recently finished the restoration. They would like to try some of our grain, quality dependent, but it is unlikely to be much.

Wrights mill http://www.wrightsflour.co.uk

The MD of this 150 year old, quite large, family mill in Enfield called me himself and sent the following email a few days later:

“Following on from our conversation Wendy we would be able to turn your grain into flour, packed in 16 kg sacks and delivered in 26 pallet loads for £150 per tonne. As I mentioned it would probably be best to buy the grain from you at the market price and sell the flour back to you at this additional cost of £150 per tonne. Bear in mind too that we would need a minimum of 29 tonnes of grain which we will process in one go.”

On the phone he also offered the choice of 1.5kg or 500g bags (for an additional cost). All bags will be plain but can be labelled with a design of our choosing.

He said we would get around 20 tonnes of flour for our 30 tonnes of grain (I guessed we might have this amount). Processing takes around 48 hours to clean, condition mill and pack. We will then need to take delivery of the flour as they cannot store it for us.

We can call to book in the work with around a week’s notice of the harvest. They usually do wheat but can also process spelt (if we are able to grow it, of course).

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If we end up growing a millable grain I think we have a couple of choices. To use a mill that can process all of the grain in one go and then try to find a buyer for the flour. Or we find several smaller mills to take a part of the grain each who then mill and sell the flour to their own customers. The later would be a nice goal of the project but may be a logistical nightmare!

Apologies to those in the know if some of the info is basic – I have included if I thought it was interesting/useful to know. And do say if you think I have missed any options or you have questions on what I have found out.

@wendyalcock this is really interesting and helpful to get a picture of the various options, including labelling and distribution. Great that mills of different scales are interested too. Thanks for researching and sharing 👍

A quick update for those expecting another vote...we have found some 'summer' spelt in Germany and are currently trying to work out how to get it back to the UK. Thus it looks like we can go with the original vote and grow spelt, but how it will grow, nobody knows.

Meanwhile, if anyone has a van and a spare day or two and fancies a trip to what Grahame assures me is the most beautiful part of East Germany, then get in touch. We will be bringing two tonnes back in big bags.
More later...

Fabulous news @johncherry so pleased to know that you have sourced summer spelt and we can now grow it as we originally hoped to.. Congrats for finding it! 😃 👍

_The Spelt has now been ordered, paid for, transport arranged. _ The well-named German who is selling us the Spelt, Werner Backer (which means Baker), has told me he will make it ready tomorrow (Saturday); and it will be picked up on Monday.

It has been an exciting joint effort. Carolin located the Spelt, despite being about to go to Africa. Several people helped finding transport, thanks for that. I could arrange same-day payment out of my Berlin account, and John called many shippers and found one who can collect and deliver before Easter.

What we are buying is organic Spelt, which is direct from harvest so not sold as seed: it will then need to be cleaned, sieved and prepared for planting here at Weston. John will know more about this when he sees it next week. It is coming from a very beautiful part of the former East Germany, near the border with Czechoslovakia, so has a good provenance. (For those who want to look up the area, DE 96364 Marktrodach-Seibelsdorf)

Brilliant team effort everyone. Very excited to be on the next stage.

Wow! Well done Carolin, John, Grahame and all! Very happy that we can go with our vote and experiment with something different, because that's what the Our Field project allows.

A picture from Herr Backer of the Spelt ready to ship..
Spelt in bags

very sexy spelt picture 😃

That's a lot of seed!

The bags are arriving in the UK tonight, so I'm hoping that they manage to get them here tomorrow so that we can sow the seed before , or over, the weekend.

Many thanks to everyone who found, ordered and dealt with all the logistics of purchasing the seed. I have been guiltily silent throughout as I do not have the organisational skills to contribute to such activities. If I had I would have wasted other people's time.
It may be normal - John - to work through the Easter holiday. If you and your colleagues do - be sure that it will be part of the story we tell.

The seed is now on farm and I'll try to clean it up tomorrow with a view to sowing it then or on Saturday. If anyone wants to watch or join in with the Morris dance we always do when planting spelt in the spring (it helps the germination) then get in touch.

Good luck with the planting and great to hear about the involvement of a Morris dance - hope to see some photos.

We cleaned up the seed today and have half a tonne or so of small seeds and bigger bits of eat etc (pictured) if anyone wants it for eating. Or whatever. We're hoping to drill tomorrow.Holy Saturday night obviate the need for Morris dancers.

Speed the seed in perfect conditions and now rolling it in to ensure it can make best use of rain forecast for tomorrow. Also might squash a few slugs.

Predictive text...should have said sowed the seed. Picture of Bassey admiring seedbed. Mmorris dancers drunk so I did a solitary jig on your behalf.

Great news and thanks for giving our filed top priority. The uncertainty of the availability of spring seed is replaced by the uncertainties that Nature always brings. Namely the weather and perhaps cold soil. How long did it take to sow the field?

On Sunday 23 April I responded to Grahame's invitation to look at the field and the bluebells. It was the 8th day after the well travelled spelt was sown. There was nothing to see in the field. It has been dry and very cold for over two weeks.

It was very good to met John and discuss how things were going. Liza - one of he family - has just completed a very interesting dissertation on conservation agriculture. I leave it to John to report on farm activity lest I get a nuance wrong

Over lunch Grahame raised the topic of whether the group would like to know more about the economics of the OurField. activity. In other words would it be possible to account for most of the inputs including for management and stewardship. I have provided with the beginnings of a spreadsheet. Keeping detailed accounts is expensive but without such metrics it will be difficult to persuade others about the impact of the unique OurField experiment. Thanks Grahame and thanks John.

Thanks for reporting back and sorry to have missed the blue bell walk and chance to catch up. It is always useful to have more information about the mechanics of farming - the photo of the seeds coming over was enough to show me the scale, which is quite scary!

Despite the cold and dryness of the weather, the spelt is coming up nicely

There's a nice dark cloud over the village which squeezed a few drops of rain out and might give the clover a start.

Sorry not to answer Tony's question (and thanking him for coming out to see the bluebells) about how long it took to sow the field; the answer is a bit under two hours, but there was a fair bit of messing about calibrating the seed metering gear. Spelt is rather different to 'normal' cereals in that the seed remains in a floret of husk and it doesn't flow very quickly so we had to open the drill up a bit. The 1600 kg of seed that we dressed, sowed over just over 8 hectares (21 acres approx), which was just what we planned. We sowed the rest of the field with oats, so there will be porridge still for tea.

We went over it again last week (another two hours) with a set of weeding harrows and a box spinning clover and trefoil seed on at 3kg/ha. We didn't get enough rain to germinate that, but on the plus side the harrows tweaked out a few little weeds. The legumes will sprout eventually, time will tell if they can do any good. We undersowed the oats with this too, by way of adding interest.

In terms of the next decision you will need to make is whether we want to add any fertiliser and whether to spray fungicides and plant growth regulators. Without fertiliser, you probably won't need PGRs or fungicide. With thanks to @danielkindred , we had a fantastic Soil Health Test done, by NRM laboratories. I could perhaps post this if anyone is interested. My reading of this is that there is a fair bit of available nitrogen in the soil and enough of other essential nutrients to grow a crop. Daniel might read it differently. I certainly wouldn't want to apply any nitrogen with the ground being so dry and no rain forecast for a while. But it would be good to know what everybody thinks, so we can plan to act if necessary.

Hi John. Thanks for the update. If you think we will understand the soil health test it would be good to see it. When do you think we need to make the decision about which, if any, sprays to apply?

I think I have understood that one of the uses of the soil health test, too, is to gauge long term changes in fertility, soil organic carbon content etc, - in which case if the OurField group continues, and continues with the same field, and if we remember to have the same tests done annually at about the same time, and if the weather conditions at the time the samples are taken is similar, gradually we can accumulate a useful set of indicators - is that how it works? (A bit like periodic cholesterol and blood pressure tests..), or are these absolute values, useful of themselves..

__ An aerial view? __
I am very happy to say that Tony Allen has sent me a satellite image of the farm area around the OurField plot.
Find it here..
It must be an old image, as all the fields seem to have been ploughed within an inch of their lives..anyhow, it has at least revealed to me my ignorance of what area OurFieldWeston is actually cultivating. _ I have circled in red my idea about this as a first stab, and for John to laugh at, as to what I think is the area._
Now there was a drone up recently, so perhaps someone @edna has a better still-shot of the area? and perhaps with John, I can home in on an accurate representation of where we are..

Very many thanks Graham for the comments on the soil tests. I agree with Wendy that we would like to see any test results that John is prepared to share.

It is very good to see the spelt coming up despite the low temperatures and the absence of rain. . There must be some soil moisture in what is still very cold soil.

The irrigators must be getting worried about what is becoming a drought. Let there be rain - soon..

Not sure if this will work, but I hope I'm attaching Daniel's soil test. There are one or two odd things which I don't understand, like why, if we have very high soil health, do they think we should aim to reduce it. Also I didn't fill in the worm count (there were loads...trust me) or tell them what we were growing (hence no fertiliser recommendations).

To answer Grahame's post about soil tests, they are absolute values, but only relate to the spoonfuls of soil which I collected as I walked a large 'W' across the field. The aim is to collect an average sample of the soil from the whole field, so I took a little bit from here and a bit from there (approx. 20 samples) and mixed them all together. It's a snap-shot of a moment in time, but is useful to give us an idea of what's going on.

The red line on the map is only round half the field, the bit immediately to the right (up to the hedge) is yours too

That soil test is sooo interesting! The soil microbial activity is super high - amazing - do you think that is almost all down to the many years of no-till @johncherry ? Have you ever mob grazed this field? and yes that seems very bizarre that they are suggesting you decrease your soil quality?

I agree we should apply 50 kg N/ha. I would favour applying as Ammonium Nitrate rather than urea, as risk of substantial N losses to ammonia from urea less especially if soil dry.
The soil analyses done here don't really help in knowing how much N to apply. To measure available N in soil requires sampling soil to 60cm depth, keeping samples cool and lab measurement of nitrate and ammonium-N. Assuming a normal arable rotation without large applications of manure or v high organic matter soil we'd expect soil N level to be low, so normally little value in testing for soil-N. John, can you remind me of previous crop and whether any manures/composts etc have been applied in recent years.
Given that we don't know how well the Spelt will stand I think best not to apply much more than 50kg N/ha in case it causes the crop to lodge. Also applying more than 50 kg negates the benefit of the clover, assuming it comes through ok.
The P & K indices were low for this soil. We could consider applying Di-ammonium phosphate to give some phosphorous as well as nitrogen and help early growth... but probably too late now for this too give a cost effective response. We rarely see clear responses to the current crop from in season P or K fertiliser applications even in high yielding wheat crops, so unlikely to be worthwhile here. The policy for P & K is normally to apply to the soil for the long term rather than the crop in season.

1 Thank you for the soil report.

2 Have you had much rain this week?

We've been gasping for rain for weeks and now, thankfully, we've had a bit. Well, over two inches so far and it's still raining. Enough already!

The spelt looks good and is really starting to motor. We need to decide whether we want to apply some nitrogen fertiliser. I was talking to Richard the agronomist about this yesterday and his thoughts were that if we don't apply any, then we'll have a very disappointing harvest. He's recommending applying 50kg/hectare of urea now (approx. cost £20/hectare) which will give it a bit of oomph and help it grow away from the few weeds which are appearing. There is not much sign of the clover/trefoil yet, they should make an appearance now the soil is wetted through.The urea should help them get away too. Over to the collective on this decision...

How has the soil coped withe the heavy rainfall? Has it drained down into the profile effectively

How does your proposed application of nitrogen to the spelt compare with what you are doing on other spring sown grains. As we do not have an organic option I would take Richard's advice. I look forward to the discussion.

Please report in due course on how the spelt is out-competing the weeds (which ones?) or not.

All news very much appreciated. The more technical the better.

The rain has soaked in beautifully as we'd hope on soil under no-till. Couple of photos

We have unfortunately got some rather wide rows as you can see. The spelt blocked some of the metering mechanism...I don't think it'll hurt it too much, but may allow more weed growth. In the top photo you can see some sow-thistle coming. There are a few other broad-leaved weeds, but if we spray them off then we'll wipe out any clover/trefoil under-storey, so we'll keep an eye out for what comes.

@johnanthonyallan to answer your question about how much N we would normally give our spring crops...in the region of 100 to 150 kg/ha depending on what they are and how good they look

thanks so much for the photos and update @johncherry so interesting and helpful!