If you spend any real time farming, properly farming, with your hands in the soil and your eye on the weather, you come to recognise that the year doesn’t begin in January. It begins now, around the spring solstice, when the land shrugs off winter and gets back to the business of growing.

For generations, this point in the farming calendar has been less about ritual and more about readiness. The balance of light and dark tells you the soil is warming, that grass will come, that animals can finally begin to fend for themselves again. It’s the starting gun for the busiest, most hopeful stretch of the year.

Out in the fields, things are already underway. Lambing, in all its messy, sleep-depriving glory, is front and centre. There are few better reminders of what’s at stake than a newborn lamb, all legs and uncertainty blinking into a world that can still, at this time of year, be bitterly cold. You do what you can, shelter where needed, intervene when necessary, but mostly you let nature take its course. It usually knows what it’s doing. Usually.

The truth is, spring is not gentle. It’s energetic, unruly, and occasionally unforgiving. One warm week and everything surges forward, grass, hedges, insects, and then a cold snap comes along to check it all again. If you’re farming well, you learn to work with that volatility rather than against it. Which is where the old rhythms still earn their keep.

The spring solstice, sitting between the equinox and the headlong rush into summer, is a useful marker. Not because you follow it blindly, but because it encourages you to pay attention. To soil temperature rather than air temperature. To what’s happening under your feet, not just what’s visible above ground.

Scratch the surface of a healthy field at this time of year and it should be teeming with worms and fungi, all the unseen life that makes everything else possible. Get that right, and you’re halfway there. Ignore it, and no amount of fertiliser or clever kit will save you in the long run.

There’s a temptation, particularly in modern systems, to push hard at the first sign of growth, to sow early, graze tight, maximise every inch, but the land isn’t a factory floor. It doesn’t respond well to being bullied. Give it a bit of breathing space, leave your margins wild, let the hedgerows thicken up, allow insects and birds to do their bit and you’ll find it pays you back in ways that are both obvious and subtle over time. Better soil. Healthier animals. Fewer problems down the line. And better food, ultimately, which is where all of this should be heading.

The work that begins around the spring solstice isn’t just about getting crops in the ground or livestock through another season, it’s about setting the tone for what ends up on the plate. Flavour, nutrition, integrity, they all start here.

So yes, the days are getting longer, the workload is ramping up, and there’s a fair bit of mud still about. But there’s also momentum now, a sense that things are moving, properly moving, after the long stall of winter. You can feel it in the soil. You can see it in the hedgerows. You can hear it, if you stop for a moment, in the return of birdsong.

The farming year has begun again, with a determined unfolding and now it’s time to roll up your sleeves, pay attention, and get on with all the jobs that now need to be done to get nutritious food on the table again.