The weather has been very kind over the past few weeks, with ground firming up well again. The last few days have been perfect for grazing clean-outs and hopefully for finishing the last of the tillage harvest.

With straw and grain yields and quality a mixed bag this year, plus a lot of hardship endured through a very erratic growing and harvesting season, we could all do with a more conventional year to ease the strain on the tillage sector and to keep enough good-quality grain and straw supplied to the livestock sector. Hopefully, the good start means everyone can do a bit better next season.

The dry conditions are also helping us to get some hedges cut in rougher and wetter parts of the farm that were skipped in the wet weather last autumn and winter. We should get most of this work done early this autumn and hopefully park up another machine for the winter as soon as possible.

There is a good crop of berries on the farm this year, so we will try to leave as much of these as possible for wildlife over the winter. We have a lot of hedges on the farm and although they need a bit of maintenance and take up a fair bit of space, they are a unique piece of our Irish heritage and a valuable natural resource for our native wildlife.

We try to manage the hedgerows as well as possible, but we can always improve how we do things. We also try to plant a few trees every year and leave a few corners of the farm to nature, to try to improve biodiversity in our local area.

We received a very frustrating letter this week however, stating that we had over-claimed the area on our BPS submission this year. We had planted a few corners of paddocks in recent years and these areas are starting to fill in and are now deemed ineligible for BPS payments. Other areas excluded were fenced off areas around a stream and roadways that have been added to the farm over the last year.

We are under the threshold for any penalties, but it is very frustrating to have these areas excluded, when they all have an obvious and tangible benefit to biodiversity on our farm. The system that is supposed to be promoting greening and more environmentally friendly forms of farming is failing badly in this instance.

Hopefully, the next round of CAP will take a more logical view of these types of areas. In fact, we might even consider planting a few more trees and we had hoped to create a pond or wetland in a boggy area of the farm, but under the current rules, we would quickly run short of hectares on which to claim BPS payments. We don’t need to be rewarded for these actions, but it’s hugely frustrating to be penalised for trying to do the right thing.