We’ve seen this year what a huge effect water availability has had – Arable Farming
We live on the Waveney flood plain which means the ditches need clearing out intermittently ...
They haven’t been done for a while, but were cleared out earlier this month. At least we don’t have to dig them by hand as they would have been done years ago when the marsh was drained – now it only takes a 3.5 tonne digger a day.
When the drains were first dug, the spoils were piled up, upon which a few houses were built to protect them from flooding.
We’ve been told our house was built at the end of the 1600s and the oak was from Spanish galleons that were sailed up the Waveney then the Dove and dismantled at Hoxne. While the digger was with us, we also had the pond dug out as that had silted up, but the ground was so dry the digger hardly made a mark.
The River Waveney is still very low. Generally, the low levels of the rivers around East Anglia are of concern for growers who soon need to be filling up reservoirs with winter fill, or hope the ground water is replenished to allow abstraction from the chalk via boreholes or rivers next summer.
We’ve seen this year what a huge effect water availability has had with potato fields that struggled to be kept wet. The wide joins and wind affected areas are showing up with a big effect on yield and size of the crop in the same field due to lack of water.
Budgeting
In this changing climate, growers must start budgeting for higher water requirement per day for the crop’s life. I have heard of figures of up to 4mm per day, and areas of irrigatable land may need to be adjusted to enable the crop to be grown. With the cost of growing potatoes now, it’s not economical to put them in the ground if water can’t be guaranteed. It may rain all of next summer, but with the numbers being so high who can afford the risk?
Some growers on the Lincolnshire silts that had good rains six weeks ago are in the 120t/hectare region. However some fields in other areas will be very poor where the rain hasn’t come in time. I’ve still got customers who haven’t recorded more than 10mm of rain since May.
At least its proving to be a relatively easy potato harvest so far, but there’s still a long way to go for some.
We’re looking to have a silt potato demo site in 2023, similar to our fen site which we ran for five years. This would look at various different aspects of the crop agronomy specific to silt soils, so something to talk about over the coming months.
The beet factories have opened and again water and soil type are having an effect on yields. Rust is the dominating disease in beet this season and our in-house trials have some good differences between the treatments. The old standards are definitely being superseded by newer products and some others not yet approved are also showing good disease control, which should result in strong yield differences.
Cercospora hasn’t started to be a significant issue yet, but it was late developing last season and what I have seen is worse on the virus-affected plants. I wonder if it will continue to develop as the weather is still very mild – we’ll have to wait and see.
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