Mrs Down's Diary

WE have a specialist tyre company at the farm this morning pumping the front tyres of our biggest four-wheel- drive tractor full of water. When this extra traction is combined with a full set of weights on the front of the machine, John hopes to have gained enough traction to be able to get into the least wet of our fields and start mole-ploughing.

Why? Well the land is currently so wet that without this extra help the tractor would just skid and skedaddle on top of our clay soil, churning up the field and making it almost impossible to make a decent job of ploughing.

We appreciate that even though we are considering it grim that we cannot get on and get drilled up, at least our harvest is safely in the grain shed and all the forage we need for the winter is under cover. Many of our neighbours still have many acres to go to finish harvest.

John sold the last field harvested for straw to a neighbour with a dairy herd.

"Leave me an acre or so to make some small bales," he asked him as they shook hands on the deal. Ten days later and not a scrap of straw has been baled. The field closely resembles a rice paddy in parts and we are bringing in a specialist contractor to try to get some of the water away into the main drainage board dike that runs at the end of the field.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette October 1