Kevin Prince has wide experience of farming and rural business in Hampshire, where he lives near Andover, and across southern England as a director in the Adkin consultancy. His family also run a diversified farm with commercial lets, holiday cottages and 800 arable acres.

AS I write this in beautiful early morning, late August sunshine with a cloudless blue sky overhead it is very easy to forget how wet the 2023/2024 season was for many farmers across the country. Many growers were forced to plant their spring crops far later than they would normally consider acceptable, simply because it had been too wet to physically get on the ground in the traditional planting window.

The lateness of planting has two obvious knock-on effects, firstly the crops are going to be later maturing and so harvest will be later, which is why as you drive around the countryside you will still see fields with crops in them at a time when, in most years, they would normally be being prepared to be planted to next year's crop. Secondly, the quantity, or yield, of the crop is going to be less because it has not been growing in the optimum weather at the optimum time of year.

(Image: Kevin Prince)

Worryingly for many farmers, in addition to the above two problems, many arable growers are reporting that the quality of the harvested crop is also lower than they had hoped which will also reduce the value of the crop for many farmers. This won’t be true across the whole country, and I know that some farmers further north have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the crops being harvested despite the atrocious growing season. We won’t know the true picture until all the crops are in the barns, but it is unlikely that many arable farmers will be celebrating 2024 as a good year.

The harvest season tends to see larger than usual numbers of expensive pieces of machinery being left in fields overnight which brings into focus rural crime. As the nights begin to slowly lengthen darkness also provides cover for the less honest members of society. I was reminded of this last week when a text arrived in the late afternoon from my wife informing me that she had discovered two young gentlemen (no more than 13 or 14) in one of our sheds apparently taking photographs of an unattended trailer on their mobile phones.

If the trailer had been more interesting, larger, or newer I would perhaps have given them the benefit of the doubt and considered them farm machinery enthusiasts. However, as the trailer is at least 30 years old, is losing paint rapidly and is, (as auctioneers used to describe scruffy, rusty pieces of machinery) “very much in its working clothes” I think any genuine tractor spotting interest was unlikely. I was much more concerned about it appearing on some dark web auction website offering for it to be stolen to order. Cue speedy collection of trailer and installation of yet more security and trail cameras.

It was a reminder to me for all of us in rural areas to keep an eye out for suspicious behaviour and ensure we do all to protect unattended tools and machinery. We are still fortunate to live in an area of relatively low crime levels and we should all do all we can to keep it that way.