The last fruits have been harvested for this year.
We are now in mid-November, which means only one month till Christmas. A calendar year is coming to an end and we are looking back on a year that we will all remember and not fully understand. But if we look at the area that deals with the field trials, we were lucky that despite the corona situation we have been able to maintain pretty much all trials.
So how did it go? The fall of 2019 was wet. It made it very difficult to get our winter seed fields planted, and we had to struggle to find the good days. The spring of 2020, when we had to plant the spring crops, was dry. We had to water a lot and early. At Flakkebjerg, we have a number of hectares at our disposal, and therefore the sale of grain is also a large part of our budget. We had already sold some grain early in the year. But not as much as previous years, but we do not know how corona affects prices. Take malt barley as an example. It is used for the production of beer, and it has been greatly affected because we cannot go to restaurants or host parties. In Denmark, many farmers chose to focus on the yield and sell the spring barley as fodder barley already in early spring. Therefore, less has been offered. I have just now chosen to sell the last barley we had in stock. It turned out to be a good decision.
The rapeseed was sold already in the autumn on a matif agreement, which ended a month ago. The wheat was sold at the same time at the right price, just as the last malt barley was also just sold. So luckily, we are over our budget on grain sales.
The yields also play an important role, but despite the fact that we had a good grain harvest, our rapeseed disappointed, and overall our harvest yields were a little lower than last year. The harvest, on the other hand, was easy. The weather has been good and dry so there was no cost for drying.
For the coming season, I have already chosen to sell some of our rapeseed and a small amount of wheat.
The autumn of 2020 started dry, and we had problems with the first rapeseed, but luckily there was some rain at the end of August. That means our rapeseed looks fine. In September we sowed the rest of the winter seed and it also looks really good.
So, a good start to a new season.
Thomas Jensen
Operations manager Flakkebjerg