News

When should a first wheat be treated as a second wheat?

With an anticipated reduction in demand due to the disruption from COVID combined with reports of quality issues leading to costly deductions and rejections, a number of malting barley growers are looking at sowing winter wheat following…

Managing People

Managing people and getting the best from staff can be challenging. Often farmers themselves have never been employed other than by the family business and this makes the thought of…

Keeping Pace with Green Policy

For over ten years, Scottish agriculture has come to recognise the importance of sustainable management of the farmed environment, mainly in response to the growing climate crisis and biodiversity decline.…

Combine Settings in a Bad Skinning Year for Malting Barley

With the malting barley harvest now underway, it is being reported that skinned grain levels are higher than normal in grain samples. This can lead to deductions or worse costly rejections with…

Grain sampling during COVID restrictions

Many grain merchants provide an on-farm grain sampling service to their clients in order to gauge the quality and suitability of grain lots. This is extremely important in the case of malting barley…

Evaluating Wheat Choices for this Autumn

In recent years, the Scottish wheat area has been relatively productive within the wider UK harvest. Although not perfectly resilient, the predominantly soft-wheat crop has coped well with extremes in local growing conditions. Whilst too soon to report on the yield and quality that 2020 will deliver, news from further south has been…