April 2020: Farm news

Farm Manager Olly Pemberton on the latest from Weir Farm

April has been a busy month on the farm, allowing us to catch up after a challenging autumn. We have applied most of the fertiliser to our winter wheat, winter barley and oilseed rape, and managed to plant all our spring barley and maize. As the days get longer and warmer (and long may that continue) the young plants are starting to develop and grow.

Our cattle have now been turned out, and the youngest have never been outside before so there was a lot of excited running along, giving farm hand Matt’s fencing skills a thorough test.

Wild bird margins are almost ready to establish, and we do a proportion of these each year to ensure there is plenty of seeds available to eat over the winter when natural food is short, as well as providing habitat for them to live in as the arable crops start to get too dense.

Thoughts now turn to the silage season and we are gearing up to start mowing and foraging 1st cut grass to go to several local dairy farms as feed for their herds. Any excess is retained on the farm for our own use over the winter with our cattle.

It is wonderful to see so many people exploring the farm and it is really starting to come alive – we have had many members of the public stop us and ask questions about what we are up to so we will be starting to put some (hopefully) informative signs around the farm, but please keep asking what we are up to!

Stay safe in these challenging times.