For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
  • 1
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
User avatar
By nallen
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876273
Fascinating, as always; and any day with a new word (brashy) is a good one.

If you're planting a new type, does that affect your decision about selling the crop in advance, or do you wait to see how it pans out the first time?

(Looking for magenta lines on those screens … :D )
User avatar
By TheFarmer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876315
There are different types of wheat.

Bread making wheat, biscuit wheat, and feed wheat (animal feed).

When I plant a new wheat variety I know what the end use will be, and I grow it accordingly in terms of treating it. For a bread variety it’s important that the grain protein levels are 13%+, and on light chalky land that can be hard to attain. Bread wheat can also be grown with all the additional costs and then be rejected for a lack of elasticity, a lack of protein, or a low volumetric weight. If it falls below weighing 720 Grammes per litre, it can instantly be rejected to go as feed wheat, and all the additional growing costs are wasted.

While wheat is at an all time high in terms of value, many growers are simply growing high yielding feed wheats which will make them a guaranteed margin, and not bother with the additional bread premium risks.
nallen, Sooty25, Pete L and 1 others liked this
User avatar
By Pete L
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876364
TheFarmer wrote:While wheat is at an all time high in terms of value, many growers are simply growing high yielding feed wheats which will make them a guaranteed margin, and not bother with the additional bread premium risks.


I always joked with Viv about eating the horse muesli instead of the one that came from the supermarket.
User avatar
By Pete L
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1876431
Paultheparaglider wrote:Deleted, with apologies to Pete L.


For the record, no offence taken. For bemused forumites, I'll explain soon.
#1876463
The old length of one furlong (short for furrow long) is 220 yards. An acre is 1 furlong x 1 chain (22 yards). A chain, incidentally, is the distance between cricket stumps. Therefore a ten acre field, if square, is one furlong by one furlong. Many fields in the far north are set out in ten acre sections, since very early days. Ploughing, using a single furrow plough and a pair of Clydesdales was a very skilled operation - setting out marker poles, scratching the headrig start/stops. Some field drystone walls had capping stones laid flat at every chain to ease setting out. Indeed, it took a day to turn over an acre - if the horses behaved themselves. Modern ploughing rigs can probably do an acre in half an hour.
Chains occasionally crop up at farm roups (dispersal sales) and are of 100 links.
User avatar
By Sooty25
#1876476
TheFarmer wrote:Not sure, but it’s a modern day football pitch in terms of size. :thumright:


That doesn't help, I've only ever been to one football match and that was ages ago!

Bill McCarthy wrote:The old length of one furlong (short for furrow long) is 220 yards. An acre is 1 furlong x 1 chain (22 yards). .


Now that helps! 220 x 22 = 4840 sq yrds

Our E/W runway = 490 x 17 = 8330 sq yrds

About 1.75 acres, now that I can visualise! :D
User avatar
By eltonioni
#1876480
Sooty25 wrote:
TheFarmer wrote:Not sure, but it’s a modern day football pitch in terms of size. :thumright:


That doesn't help, I've only ever been to one football match and that was ages ago!


If you're having trouble visualising a football pitch, just imagine a piece of land about an acre in size.

Happy to help. :cyclops:
User avatar
By kanga
#1876502
Charles Hunt wrote:Love the first picture.

Wasn't one definition of an acre as the area that a man (presumably plus horse!) could plough in a day?


<mediaeval history nerd :oops: >

.. which, in turn, explains why it (and furlong) were variable measures for many centuries, dependent on the heaviness of the soil ..

</>

[one of the history dons at my Cambridge College, by then old, was the first post-elementary educated member of his local farming family. He offered guided walk to undergraduates - taking all sorts of degree subjects - around the local fen villages. He would jump into drainage ditches with a trowel to scoop up samples of muddy soil, pointing out that where the soil was light the field might well be called something like 'long acre', hedged or walled accordingly, because the horse plough could finish a larger area within the day. Analogously, an apparently small (by evidence of walls/hedges or their former lines) enclosure would show clayier trowelfuls in the ditches. He would also carry copies of pertinent mediaeval or Tudor/Stuart era local maps. Fascinating! Much of the evidence, however, was even then, '60s, disappearing as the fields were being enlarged for the bigger machinery]
Last edited by kanga on Sat Jun 25, 2022 4:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Charles Hunt, Jim Jones liked this
  • 1
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22