Morning all!

Summer next week, just in time for the farm harvest we hope. Although we don’t have much to do with all the work involved it is always a relief to see one part of the family doing well and the crops in the barns. Early days yet but there were some anxious farmers about with all this dampness over the summer so far. At least with the light chalky ground we are on they will be able to get on with it as soon as the crops are ready, assuming the rain holds off for a bit.


Although world prices of cereals have done ok in the last couple of years, the dairy farmers are not fairing so well as we have seen in the news this week. For ages now they have been pressured by the ever increasing power of the last remaining big milk companies and their main customers, the supermarkets. They were already complaining of producing at cost or below before cuts of 4p+ a litre were imposed this year, no wonder they have taken to blockading the dairies. The supermarkets blame the competitive consumer market place but I don’t see them operating at a loss. They have the power and they aren’t afraid to use it,  you have to wonder what the long term cost will be of their bullying tactics to provide us with cheap stuff?

I had a trip out this week to an HDC herbaceous group meeting to see what research they are up to and to ask us how we would like them to proceed. Not usually my cup of tea but it was nice to find an excuse to meet up with other growers and also visit another nursery. After such a difficult season it was reassuring to hear of everyone else’s tales of woe and to see that our nursery doesn’t look too bad either. In a year like this it is very easy to lose confidence in lots of areas.  Although the next year is going to be really tough I am feeling like it is time to take things forward again. This was timed well to fit in with our ongoing training programme in Lean Management. We have just finished week 3 and started on our first improvement project in the potting shed which already looked pretty slick but has now stepped up into another league. Not only is it much better but we can now see even more improvements to follow on in future developments. Although at first it does look a bit like we have just had a major spring clean, it does go much deeper than that. The team have come up with machine design, work process and work place organisational changes to reset how we work in that area. One of the clever bits was designing into the process the elimination, where possible of making any mess.  This makes big tidying up sessions and trip hazards etc things of the past. The test will be to see if we can sustain the new practices, it certainly looks good at the moment. Over the next few weeks we will have to sort out other areas for everyone to do their own smaller group projects on, the list is already growing as everyone starts to see the potential benefits we could all gain from this.

Eco News

Only a few more days to go before the first anniversary of the starting up of the wind turbines. It looks like we are going to be slightly down on predicted output, probably about 10% down although 6.5% of that was due to turbine downtime with the initial teething stoppages we had during the first year. So to be only 2.5% out on predicted wind speeds over just one year is close enough for me. Let’s hope the next year see’s fewer stoppages as the turbines settle in and the jackdaws are kept out. The annual service is next week so hopefully they will report back that all is ok. Caroline was hoping for a trip up the tower if it wasn’t too windy but she’s not sure if the broken arm is recovered enough yet. I suspect it might have to be next year.

I can’t remember if I mentioned that we have now fitted more LED lights in the lab growth room. This will extend the trial we started 9 months ago and will start paying back their relatively high cost in saved energy and reduced cooling requirement. We now have 8 of our 114 lights as LED’s which saves approx 5kWhrs per day, not a lot but it all adds up. Had we had a better year we would fit more but cash is tight and the initial costs are high. At the moment we are replacing light units as they wear out which does help towards the cost.

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Have a good week, from all at Kirton Farm Nurseries