There’s a lot of work going on at Hillfarm every day. Last year we were lucky enough to grow rapeseed oil all around Hillfarm, as can be seen in this photo.
The buildings are right in the middle of the yellow. These fields are now growing winter wheat, and may be rapeseed again in 2010. Hooray!
Hillfarm
Aerial photo of a field of our rapeseed, last April (2008). This field is 30 hectors in size and produced approximately 100 tons of rapeseed, which will produce up to 30,000 litres of wonderful healthy oil.
Friends of the local wildlife Many many insects, bees and butterflies our found in our rapeseed crops. They can feed from the pollen, or catch their prey in the tall crop itself. Rapeseed is a fantastic food and shelter for lots of wild life, and because we move it from field to field (crop rotation) it creates lots of biodiversity in the countryside.
The large white heap in this photo is waste lime from the sugar beat factory. We use it as a base fertiliser for our fields, and as a long term soil improver. Many things used in agriculture can be recycled back into the soil, forming a complete circle, and showing how great we are becoming at reducing waste.
Rapeseed pods just before harvest are brown (as in photo), and very fragile. As soon as you touch them they shatter, making harvest quite tricky.
The rapeseed is a very black, small seed as can be seen in the photo on the right, a bit like poppy seeds, the outer shell is black but the lovely oily part in the middle is yellow, hence the beautiful yellow of our oil.
We use a conventional combine harvester to gather the seed, as seen in this photo. This combine is a Claas 600 Terra Trac, and has an output of up to 30 Tons per hour when we are at work. We wait until the seed is dry enough, (9% moisture) and then combine as much as we can before it rains again. (This seems to be quite often!!)
The machine in the photo on the right is called a Simba Unipress (as it has one row of wheels) and we use it to cultivate and consolidate the top few inches of our fields before we plant our next crop. Plants prefer firm seed beds, not “fluffy”, and this machine does this for us.
This is a picture of our rapeseed field after the combine has done its job. Leaving just stalks and chopped up straw and pod on the ground. This will be cultivated back into the soil, creating great organic matter for the soil and the worms.
Our cultivator is made by a company called Vaderstad from Sweden, it has discs, then big tines, then discs and then a heavy packer. The theory is that we can cultivate our land in one pass. With wet summer weather, this is becoming more difficult, dry soil will always cultivate better, adding in oxygen removing compaction, and mixing in crop residue. |
