Crop Watch – Farmers Weekly
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An early harvest of both cereals and maize is leading to a generally earlier-than-usual planting period this year. The weather is helping this along by not getting too wet too soon.
Winter oilseed rape crops have generally established pretty well, with little sign of early cabbage stem flea beetle damage. As in most seasons, slugs have represented the biggest threat to rapeseed crop establishment this year. Crops will need monitoring for early signs of light leaf spot and phoma.
Due to the extremely localised effects of rainfall, pressure could be very different from one farm to another. Currently, across the area, I am collecting soil samples from fields that are quite damp, and then in other fields that are not far away the ground is still very dry and quite hard.
The first winter cereal crops have now been in the ground for approaching three weeks at the time of writing. These crops have emerged quickly and will quite obviously be at severe risk from aphids and barley yellow dwarf virus. Daytime temperatures have been higher than average for the time of year.
I would therefore urge growers not to delay the first application of an aphicide to control what can be an absolutely devastating disease. As we go into the autumn, potential spray days become fewer and further between, so it becomes even more important to get these applications on when there is a window in the weather.
Putting the first application on too late can mean that all follow up applications are wasted as the crop is already infected and, as a rule of thumb, the earlier a crop becomes infected, the worse the disease will be when it starts to manifest itself in late winter or early spring.
This autumn has seen the enthusiastic adoption of several new/newish varieties on quite a wide scale. Bolton has led the way on the winter barley front after a good season in 2022 and the two wheats Dawsum and Champion have made inroads into what had previously been Graham and Extase markets. It will be very interesting to see if they perform in practice as well as they appear to in trials. I would have to say early indications from 2022 performance, albeit on a limited acreage, are encouraging.
With more rain in recent days, soils are getting wetter, although there is still precious little in the way of moisture at plough depth in places. The oilseed rape acreage is down in the area due to the lack of rain at the desired drilling time. The rapeseed that was drilled went in the ground from about 26 August to 10 September, with mixed success. Those who simply took seed from the shed and drilled it have, on the whole, faired worse than those who invested in a hybrid variety and applied nutrition to the crop.
Cabbage stem flea beetle numbers have been down on previous years, although the later drilling period this year has meant that there hasn’t needed to be as many to do the same amount of damage.
Winter cereal drilling is now under way, and fields are being treated with the traffic light system for blackgrass – green fields which are fairly clean can be drilled earlier; yellow and red fields with higher seed banks will benefit from delayed drilling to allow for flushes of blackgrass to be sprayed off with glyphosate first.
Cinmethylin – the new active ingredient for the control of blackgrass in winter wheat – has shown good levels of control in trials. However, this isn’t the “silver bullet”, and to keep levels of control high, all the other well-practised measures still need to be employed – stale seed-beds, delayed drilling and higher seed rates will all lead to better control of blackgrass.
Keeping an eye on the bottom line and input prices seems to be a full-time job these days. With the high price of phosphate fertilisers, alternatives are being looked at to provide crops with phosphate at lower prices than buying triple super phosphate (TSP) and applying to the seed-bed or soon after.
Microgranule fertilisers containing phosphate, such as Primary-P, are being applied down the coulter at drilling, giving a relatively small but targeted application of phosphate into the root zone. This will promote rooting and provide the crop with a valuable root structure to take up nutrition in the spring, when levels may again be reduced from the norm due to higher fertiliser prices.
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