Behind the Scenes - Harvesting our Crop

How we harvest our crops is something we are asked more and more these days. With many scary stories in the news about the use of glyphosphates, we completely understand why these questions are being asked.

We share consumers concerns about the use of glyphosphates, such as round up and because of this we never use them on our standing crops of oil seed rape. Some farmers use them to speed up the maturing of the crop so that it dries quicker meaning they can harvest earlier. We don't agree with this method, so we use a Swathing machine, which is essentially a mower which cuts the crop and leaves it in rows (swaths) which then dry out naturally. Once the crop has reached the optimum moisture level we then “pick up” the crop with a combine harvester.

We only use the swathing machine when the crop is slow to mature. Last year (this years seed) the weather was fantastic in the run up to harvest and it wasn’t necessary to use the swathing machine, and we combined the standing crop as it was dry enough.

Although the sprays are “safe” we don't like the idea of spraying the standing crop just before we harvest it, we also don't use any pesticides on the crop as we have some bee hives on the farm, and the bees forage in the oil seed rape when it is in flower.

We hope this puts your mind at rest when it comes to our rapeseed oil. We are very precious and proud of the process that we undertake to make our very special products and we believe they are more enjoyable to our customers because of this.