Farmers reel from summer misery

The persistent rain of August and early September put crops well behind any year in modern times. In many cases, only 80 per cent of crops were harvested.

An unusally late harvest because of the rain had a knock-on effect on planting winter cereals and oilseed rape crops for 2009.

Many farmers only managed to plant just over half of their normal oil seed rape crops and very few had drilled much more.

Former NFU chairman for West Sussex Trevor Passmore, who has 200 acres of wheat and barley at Church Farm, Coombes, said: "It's been one of the wettest harvests in memory. We were very late getting our crops in this year because of the rain."

In his case, he plants stubble turnips to feed his sheep during winter once he has harvested his barley, but because the barley was so late he had to start planting winter barley immediately it was harvested.

"We will have no stubble turnips this year, which means we can't feed our 600 lambs over winter and will have to sell them early, getting far less for them than we would in spring. The quality of the crop has also been down this year and there was a problem getting it harvested for small farmers like me."

For full story see West Sussex Gazette October 1