So far this October we have had approximately eight times as much rain as we had for the whole of October last year.

No wonder we have felt under pressure to get the winter cereals sown and to move cattle on to fresh paddocks to prevent too much poaching. But first things first.

As last week went on, I wondered increasingly why the single farm payment had not arrived.

I had checked at the efficiently run Department of Agriculture stand at the Ploughing and was told that everything was in order apart from some tiny overclaims of less than 0.1ha.

These were corrected on the spot so I was happy all was in order, but still the payment didn’t come. Then an official envelope arrived from the Department.

Official Department envelopes always make me nervous, but obviously I opened it to learn that mine had been one of those applications selected for “an inspection by means of remote sensing”. So the explanation for the delay in payment was now clear.

The three page letter had an incredibly detailed list of every single field in the place together with a list of the claimed area, the area passed for payment, the crop in each field and whether any reductions on individual parcels would apply.

As the satellite reported the same tiny - already corrected - overclaims that we had corrected at the Ploughing, I am assuming our payment will land in the bank account in the immediate future.

Moral of the story

For me, the moral of the story is that the level of knowledge of farming practice by officialdom is enormous and the level of potential supervision is all embracing. There is little room for operating outside the rules.

On the cattle side, we have housed another pen of cattle and got our silage tested. I am not sure how accurate the hand-held devices are in measuring silage quality.

I was conscious that our first and second cut crops had been harvested in very different weather conditions but I wasn’t prepared for the scale of the difference. The first cut gave a reading of 19% moisture at a digestibility of 70%.

The second cut was cut in the middle of a really sunny spell and after what I would have considered a good but not excessive wilt, it gave a dry matter of 60%.