This has been a difficult and disappointing harvest season. It was often wet at awkward times, delaying both sowing and harvesting of many crops for 2024 harvest, together with higher crop drying costs before grain storage.

Annual crops such as cereals are designed with a built-in biological reflex to complete their life cycles within the growing season even when sown late. This they do by short-cutting their duration to complete some reduced seed formation to ensure survival; they also abort a higher proportion of their potential grain sites along the way. The result of this is to produce fewer and smaller grains, and, thus, a disappointing harvest overall.

Timing is everything in disciplined crop husbandry, for nurture and care of optimum crop yields at high quality. However, the best efforts of good farming cannot much override difficult weather or other challenges.

Nevertheless, harvest provision calls for thankfulness. The characteristic response, ‘Mustn’t grumble’ to the standard question, ‘How are you? is really rather sad. By contrast, the joyful are always also thankful. An attitude of gratitude seems to arise from joy and to produce cheerful reactions, even when harvest results fall short of their expected potential.

Furthermore, stubbles in fields offer at least three opportunities:

We used to draw out by tractor with chains our mobile arks for pullets (young hens). They glean shed grains, thus also removing potential volunteer plants to carry over disease to the next crop. They also eat some insect pests.Some stubbles are sown with a catch crop, such as short-term stubble turnips to be grazed before the next main crop thus preventing weed colonisation, providing protective ground-cover, and manuring land.Subsoiling across stubbles when soil moisture is low enough to crack the soil at depth and break any compacted layers, noting the need to replace the deep tines as they wear quickly with the heat and friction, especially in some soil types.

At Lammas, we thanked God for the first-fruits of harvest. We thank Him now for the full harvest. We are urged to faithfulness and thankfulness, not to results-based responses to God’s calling as farming people.

“In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
(1 Thessalonians 5:18).

“Be anxious for nothing; but in everything by prayer with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”
(Philippians 4:6-7).

John Wibberley