Harvest update: ‘It’s the earliest harvest we’ve ever had’
11th July 2025
In the latest harvest update, Farmers Guide catches up with Suffolk farm manager Matthew Carter and Merseyside farmer and YouTuber Olly Harrison. Stay tuned for more updates as the season unfolds.
Matthew Carter, farm manager at Rougham Estate Farms in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, has recently started harvesting winter barley.
31ha of KWS Tardis winter barley has already been harvested, with 100ha still remaining. The barley was drilled in early to mid-October and harvested at 12.5-14% moisture.
The rotation varies by land type and includes winter wheat, winter barley, spring malting barley, milling rye, oilseed rape, sugar beet and potatoes.
Mr Carter said: “We didn’t experience any issues regarding the grain quality; the bushel weight is 70kg/hL. This harvest started about five days earlier than average. It’s a little early to say for sure how the yields are looking, but they are respectable given the lack of rain. The area we have done so far has been around 7.8t/ha.”
Asked how he would sum up the 2024/2025 season, Mr Carter added: “Pre-ems did a fantastic job, which has meant weed control has been fairly straightforward, establishment was pleasing on the whole considering the wet autumn, and crops have ripened very quickly with the 30+ degrees we have had.
The earliest harvest
Farmer and YouTuber Olly Harrison, who farms around 500ha in Merseyside, started harvesting winter barley at the end of June.
The rotation is winter barley, oilseed rape, winter wheat and spring beans.
Mr Harrison said that harvest 2025 started a week to 10 days earlier than normal.
He added: “It’s actually the earliest we’ve ever started. We’ve had a third of our average rainfall in the first six months of this year, but 46% of that actually fell in January. So, since February, it’s just been so dry; things have just died off, and this field that we started on was on the edge of the river; it was sandy land, so it just burnt off and died.
“We didn’t have a lot of winter barley because of the poor weather in the autumn, so we’ve done about 20ha and we’ve got about another 20ha to go.”
The farm will start on oilseed rape next and wheat in 10-14 days.
“We have actually had it quite wet for the last four weeks. We’ve had warm wet weather for the last three or four weeks, so stuff actually is starting to grow again.”
Asked about the winter barley yields, Mr Harrison said: “Well, what we’ve cut so far is probably down a third. The one that we cut the earliest was down by more than half.”
READ MORE: Farmers provide update on harvest 2025
READ MORE: Harvest update: Farmers kick off early harvest 2025
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