Page 42 - The Farming Years proof

JUST BARLEY
As you can see, the tractor with a 4 furrow plough capacity was coming under the heading of a must. It also matched up with a 7 ton trailer of barley. I then bought a bigger and better set of disc harrows for £343 from Eaton Tractors so the seed bed preparation went up a few notches.
We always used barley straw for the horse bedding and I note that we baled a 800 bales after harvest.
Pete, Marge the daily help’s husband, who had worked on Home Farm many years before laid the hedge at the top of the 13 acre eld. He did a good job and it needed the attention.
our yields in 1983 were 88 tons of Igri barley of which we kept 2 tons back and 19 tons of Gerbal oats of which we kept 4 tons which would last several years for supplementary horsefeed – principal- ly for Jo’s 2 personal horses. After that we stuck to our standard product barley. The grain income that year was £10,417.
1984
This was the year the Riding School expanded up to its ultimate 11 horses with Jo employing quali ed help. In June we had Rog- er Vickery with his 360 degree digger clean up the edges of the pond in the 2 acre paddock to give a de nite line in an attempt to stop horses going into the mud. We discussed with him that the menage needed enlarging and, at times, it had poor drainage. He spoke to Waltons the drainage specialists and came up with a proposition. They would put eld drains at I think what was 10 feet intervals across the menage then put ‘as raised’ gravel across the whole area followed by course sand on the top as the nished surface. They would do this at cost if they could use it as a selling example for future business, to which we agreed.
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