Harvest in this predominantly pastoral area entails a frenetic succession of grass cutting, spreading to wilt, rowing-up, baling, and wrapping in plastic as silage or haylage. The onset of hot dry weather, after weeks of rainy gloom, enables second cuts and cheers farmers who now anticipate sufficient winter fodder for their animals.
The few crops of cereals have not thrived – moulds flourished in the damp summer, spoiling grain, reducing yields and providing sparse straw. To avoid complete loss, a field near home was “cut whole” one night in late August, carted back to base and packed into the silage clamp.
Fields on Viverdon Down, the highest land in this riverside parish, used to be regularly cultivated with cereals, providing grain for cattle feed and straw for bedding; today’s high cost of fertiliser and sprays now make it more economical to buy in straw from specialist growers upcountry.
Today, more of those higher fields are sown with nitrogenous clover that increases the yield of grasses for hay and silage. Pastures vacated by grazing sheep and cattle are regularly topped to allow cuttings to be drawn back into the ground, improving fertility and soil structure; no artificial fertiliser, just home-produced farmyard manure.
Fodder beet is grown by some, but the leafy, bulked-up roots have to be mechanically dug in late autumn and winter months when the ground is usually wet and muddy.
This year an expanse of maize curves towards the tidal river at Halton Quay. Set above Hornifast Marsh and opposite the woods of Mount Ararat, the thick crop “grows high as an elephant’s eye”, each leafy stem carrying at least two cobs. Planted in mid-May, the deep-rooted plants continue to grow in September’s hazy warmth; it will be cut and chopped next month to provide some 200 tons of protein-rich winter feed for the farmer’s pedigree suckler herd of South Devon cattle.
Wandering poults, bought in as chicks and reared for nearby Pentillie’s pheasant shoots, seem content for now to avoid this dense crop, and return regularly to familiar fenced feeding runs, protected by sunflowers and other seeding plants.
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