Talking Arable – Arable Farming

With 240 hectares of Fen silty clay loam, they grow winter milling wheat, winter feed barley, spring malting barley, spring beans and sugar beet.

With the spring beans and late sown spring barley safely harvested, and a performance that can only be described as ranging from acceptable to downright underwhelming, the old green combine is now finally parked up in the open-fronted shed at Poplar Farm.

The quality of the Lynx spring beans looks good, plus there was no need for any drying as they came off the field at 14% moisture. The greenness of the stems, even though glyphosate had been applied for over a fortnight, merely highlights the absolute need for a viable desiccant for this crop since the ridiculous diquat revocation. There are some potential replacement options in carfentrazone and pyrafluthen, but the work needs to be done to gain approvals and hopefully soon.

Due to yet more politically motivated geniuses producing yet more interesting science and the subsequent ban on neonic seed dressings, there is now a huge reduction in the UK oilseed rape area being grown annually and September is a much quieter month agronomically, with time to map out autumn cereal residual programmes and trawl through lots of trials data showing the pros and cons of various actives.

One old stalwart which will be coming back into many of my programmes this year is triallate, with the classic pre-em herbicide effect of ‘I didn’t realise we had that problem until I stopped using it’ evident on several of my clients’ farms this last season.

One grower was determined to reduce his autumn herbicide spend – aren’t we all? – and a decision to move away from triallate to a lower rate prosulfocarb was taken. The result was that the efficacy of the black-grass suppression seemed to have been just about maintained but the spring appearance of various brome species and wild oats all over the farm suddenly illuminated exactly what a great job the old Avadex was doing, albeit completely under the radar.

So even if the winter wheat options will centre around the headline products of Proclus (aclonifen) or Luximo (cinmethylin), the rates and choice of their partner products will be equally as influential on how well things perform overall.

As for the wild oats, this seems to be the second year on the trot they have proved a real nuisance. With only a few viable contact options available, the need for effective residual chemistry targeted at this weed must become another major consideration in the herbicide stack decision process or the threat of a spread of target site resistance will rear its ugly head.

With the price of sugar beet this season set at a viable £40 per tonne adjusted, the decision on fungicides and how many applications has been straight forward as the return on investment is very worthwhile. But what is a worry is how a new star product in its first year of approval has still struggled to control cercospora, which in the right conditions can be a highly damaging disease.

More work needs to be done as the current standard advice is to treat beet diseases at the first sign of infection which again seems a bit ‘horses and gates’. The golden rule that eradicating diseases is always a lot harder and more expensive than preventing infections occurring in the first place always applies.

On a final note, and going all cowboy, at the Hill Farm Ranchold Calamity Claim has reared its ugly head with our spring malting barley being delivered into the Wild Frontier.

Everything was going just dandy, all the samples were spot on with no issues identified, hands were spat on and shaken as the deal was done and the wagons rolled in and out without so much as a single yee-ha, but don’t you just darn well know it, on the last two wagons we get a total of £1,785 in ‘dee-duck-shuns’, dang nab it.

Watch this space, I am currently getting all saddled up and six shooters holstered for a big showdown at the OK Saddlebow Corral.