Oilseed Rape.
The bright yellow crop everybody photographs in May. Since the neonicotinoid ban, cabbage stem flea beetle has made it a genuine gamble — a field can look perfect in September and be gone by November.
- Becomes
- Cold-pressed rapeseed oil
- Risk
- Cabbage stem flea beetle
- Sold as
- Smoked Oil and Chilli Oil
What actually happens with it.
The bright yellow crop everybody photographs in May. Since the neonicotinoid ban, cabbage stem flea beetle has made it a genuine gamble — a field can look perfect in September and be gone by November.
What survives is cold-pressed into the oils sold in the farm shop at £5.85 a bottle, which is a considerably better return than selling the seed.
- Becomes: Cold-pressed rapeseed oil
- Risk: Cabbage stem flea beetle
- Sold as: Smoked Oil and Chilli Oil
Drilled
Autumn or spring, depending on the year.
Grown
On Cotswold brash over limestone.
Harvested
Weather permitting, which is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Sold
As something worth more than the raw crop.
The field this comes out of, in the season it looks best. It does not look like this in February.
Watch it grow.
The field cameras run all year, including the eleven months when nothing happens.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
The farming does not. It made a hundred and forty-four pounds in its first year and has rarely done much better. Everything else on this site exists because of that.
Because the worst ground costs more to crop than it returns, and because hedgerow, scrub and margin do measurable work that a combine never will.
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