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Today is the day that is of great importance to arable farmers because we started our harvest for the year. I like to call it a campaign, because from a management point of view that’s what it feels like, the start of harvest is a sign that the countryside is about to become a hive of activity for as soon as the crop is taken of the ground work starts almost immediately to prepare the ground for the next growing season.
We have already decided what we are going to grow, and where we are going to grow it, this is largely dictated to us by mother nature, we try to grow as much wheat as we can, but in order to keep the levels of pests and disease to a manageable level we rotate the field that are going to grow wheat. Here we grow wheat on half the farm so that means alternating between wheat and another crop each year.
We have a selection of other crops that we can grow to give us a break from wheat. Oil Seed rape is one of our favoured options because as well as there being a good market for it the crop helps the structure of the soil to improve, it has a main root that grows like a carrot, or a turnip and that root helps to loosen the soil around it when the crop dies away. The thing about Oil seed rape is that it needs to be grown no closer than every 4 years, this means that 25% of our farm can go to oil seed rape, this leaves us with a further 25% of the farm to grow another break crop on, at the moment we are growing oats and beans.
After the crop has been harvested there is an amount of debris and weed seed left on the stubble, the idea is that we need to get as many of these weeds growing, as quick as possible after harvest so that we can kill them off before planting the next crop. There are a range of options available for me to chose from to do this the most efficiently.
- I could cultivate the ground to produce a Chit ( the first stage of plant growth) then wait until there is a good amount of weed plants on the ground, and spray the field off with a desiccant.
- I could look at the season and decide that there is enough moisture around that a chit will occur with out needing to do any thing. Then I can wait for six weeks or so and spray off before harvest.
- Or I could get a chit, then use a cultivator to dislodge the young weed seedlings and hopefully kill them. From the outset this seams to be a good idea, a way of reducing the use of chemicals. I use this method where appropriate but there are some other effects to consider.
1. The more time that I spend going up and down with a cultivator the more times I disturb the soil life. Each time I cultivate the ground I could be killing as much as 15-20% of the earth worm population, and as earth worms are a natural cultivator and pest controller I want to preserve as many of the slimy things as I can.
2. The time it takes to cultivate a field over spraying it is a big difference. To cultivate 120 acres (50 hectare’s) would take one man and a 270 horsepower tractor 15 hours. To spray that same field takes one man and a 200 horsepower sprayer 1 ½ - 2 hours.
3. The effectiveness of the weed control. This system only really works if there is a long period of dry soil to prevent the disturbed seedlings from setting their roots again.
With the crop removed it is also a good opportunity for me to add any nutrient’s that the next crop will need this is primarily potash and phosphate, but there are a range of products that I can use to make this available to the plant. I’ll talk about this another time…
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