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Hauliers reap a poor harvest
Page 8
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Emma Penny reports that our sodden summer has hit grain hauliers hard
GRAIN AND STRAW hauliers are being affected by this year's wet harvest, with work running two to three weeks behind schedule and poor crop quality causing loads to be rejected.
The prolonged spell of wet weather has left farmers throughout the UK struggling to cut crops between rainstorms. Some crops have been so badly hit by conditions that farmers are threatening to plough them in rather than harvesting them — the north of England and many areas in Scotland have born the brunt.
Perthshire has endured some of the worst weather (CM 19 and 26 August) and Stuart Kidd, transport manager for bulk haulier Morris Young (Perth), says it is having a knock-on effect on transport. "It [the harvest] has certainly been later than expected," he comments.
Kidd says many loads of grain have been rejected at the maltings due to poor quality. Instead they have had to be diverted to feed stores or returned to farms. -It doesn't make for easy scheduling if you are expecting a truck to be empty at 10am and find it has to go an extra 40 miles to a feed store to tip," he adds In the Scottish borders, a spokesman for Allied Grain confirms that some farmers have destroyed crops in the field rather than attempt to harvest them: "Every tonne chopped up is a tonne less for hauliers to move."
Further south, the weather has been slightly kinder, but straw hauliers are being affected as wet weather keeps balers out of fields. In east Yorkshire one contractor who would normally have produced 100,000 bales of straw by now has managed only 20,000.
Freeman Brawn of Dyfed-based Mansell Davies. which hauls straw from eastern England to Wales, says the operation is being affected by the weather.
The firm refuses to move wet straw, and so it has three to four farms waiting for delivery, but he adds that the problems are "not as bad as we thought they'd be".