To say that this has made decision-making challenging would be to put it mildly, with cows in and out like a yo-yo, spring drilling being drawn out over three weeks and grassland turning to mud daily.
On the positive side, I am hopeful the moisture will allow some rare spring reseeding to happen and the new trees and hedges, planted in February, have never looked so good.
As part of our farming philosophy, we aim to increase biodiversity on-farm, mainly in the form of new hedges, which create much needed wildlife corridors between our various patches of woodland, and our silvo-pasture trials in two of our paddocks.
For this we have planted mixed native trees in a 10-metre grid across seven acres of some of our poorest soil, protecting them with cactus tree guards, meaning cows can graze freely among them.
The long-term aim is to create more shade and shelter, an alternative feed source and hopefully an increase in the fungal population within the soils.
These are all medium- to long-term aspirations and we can only do this as owners of those fields, so we made sure to only invest enough money that we could afford to lose if the project failed.
Much has been said on social media in recent months about the dramatic loss in biodiversity across much of the UK and I feel that as farmers we must admit that not all we do is beneficial to our living environment.
The collapse in numbers of many of our insect populations, through wormers, insecticides, tillage and nutrients, is having a knock-on effect on bird populations, with the potential for our generation to see the loss of many of them.
The challenge for us is to maintain a productive and, most importantly, profitable farm, while also trying to minimise our impact on our farming ecosystem.
Along with the hedges we have also invested in a pto driven chipper, which will take all of the brash left over from felling and coppicing trees for our biomass boiler and turn it into a product we can compost over 12 months and hopefully use to enhance the longer term health of our soils.
We received funding for this through Farming in Protected Landscapes, which is running for another two years in certain parts of the country (we are in the High Weald).
I would highly recommend more farmers to have a look at the funding opportunities which come with this programme, particularly to those who would like to invest in machinery or grazing systems that will benefit soil health.
As I look out of the window now, the sun is blazing down and you can almost hear the grass growing, so fingers crossed for a productive spring and summer ahead.
Dan and his family own and run the 300-hectare (741-acre) Cockhaise Farm, near Haywards Heath, West Sussex. The farm is home to an organic autumn-calving herd of 240 Holstein and Friesian crosses. He also contract farms another organic autumn-calving herd of 220 cows at Bore Place near Edenbridge, Kent.
