August is really the end of the farming year as the final crops are harvested, here at least, and also marks the end of the breeding season. So it seems a good time to do a round-up of how our harvest went and how our breeding birds fared.
Both the crops and the wildlife on the farm are heavily influenced by the weather. Both need rain and both need sunshine. Little rain and the crops struggle to grow; likewise the vegetation critical for nesting habitat and food supplies also struggles to grow.
The other side of the coin is that too much rain, especially at the wrong time, also affects crop growth and can have a serious impact on nesting success and chick survival.
The combination of both has made 2012 a very challenging year. You may recall that in an earlier blog I lamented the drought conditions we had experienced for the two years leading to March, and then how the deluge began in April. Well the deluge never really stopped and we had the wettest and dullest summer on record in the region.
This caused serious problems for crop husbandry, the effects of which only became clear as wheat harvest progressed. Our wheat yields had been negatively affected by the lack of rain in the last two harvests, but this year we appear to have been negatively affected by too much rain and too little sun.
Despite this, the wheat crop looked good even in mid-July, and hopes were high of getting back above the 10 tonnes/hectare threshold but then as harvest began rumours began circulating of very disappointing yields despite the crops looking good to the naked eye. It appeared that the grains were very small and often of poor quality.
The double whammy was that the cost of growing this year’s wheat crop was considerably higher than last year. So, despite high selling prices, the effect of the poor yield and cost of growing the crop more than wiped out any benefit for the farmer of the increased wheat prices.
Our harvest began in late August, always an exciting time normally. But very quickly I could tell from the chatter on the radios that things weren’t good. Moisture levels were high, the straw was proving difficult to cut through and the yields were low. Further rain was also threatening so the combines worked well into the night to get the crop in as dry as possible.
The result was an average yield of about 8 tonnes/hectare. Very disappointing, but the quality was surprisingly good and on reflection the yield stands up very well compared to many wheat crops in our region.
Harvest was difficult and disappointing, but how did the birds do? Derek Gruar, the Senior Research Assistant at Hope Farm, carries out the wildlife monitoring of which bird surveys are a major part.
He surveys the whole farm up to 12 times from the start of April to the end of June, marking accurately each species he encounters on maps which are then collated at the end of the season to form territory maps. This forms the basis for our analysis of how well our management has improved the bird numbers on the farm. There were clear highlights from the breeding season: two pairs of lapwings breeding, a corn bunting holding territory for the second year in succession, skylarks reaching 43 territories (from 10 in 2000!), three pairs of barn owls.
Many other species were very similar to last year, but for several there were clear declines. Yellowhammers, whitethroats and greenfinches all declined considerably. The reasons for these declines are still being investigated but they are disappointing, especially the yellowhammer decline.
We use a multi-species index to illustrate the trend in our key bird populations as a whole. For this index we use the species which form the group used to calculate the national and regional farmland bird indices, these being the 19 species which are most reliant on farmland.
We have had 17 of the 19 holding territory or breeding on the farm since 2000: rook and tree sparrow are the missing ones. The trend has generally been very positive since 2000, but this year the index dropped compared to last year to a figure of 2.65, compared to 3.11 last year.
What does this mean? The simplest way of describing it is that the number of territories of the 17 species which we monitor intensively has increased by an average of 165% compared to 2000.
Despite an unwelcome decline compared to last year, this is still an amazing achievement, especially in comparison to how farmland birds are faring in general across the country.
My first year as farm manager has been a challenging one, but still a very enjoyable one. Of course I would like to report bumper yields and bird numbers, but the reality is that some years are better than others and some not. So here’s to a better year in 2013 - rain at the right time in the right quantities and lots of sunshine, please.