Arable Farmer Focus: Never-ending spraying of oilseed rape has begun for David Shepherdson

We’ve finally got the drilling cornered up, with just 12ha of first wheat to put in and a similar area of second wheat.

Patience has been required as the rain has been a constant hold-up, and at times there has been a total lack of seed to put in the drill, with some seed not coming till the third week in September.

It’s definitely been a year for ploughing, with crops going into some excellent seed-beds. However, much to the annoyance of my agronomist, none of the cereals has been rolled due to being too wet.

I’m not sure if it’s down to luck or the weather that I’ve proved expensive seed dressings aren’t required for second wheats. We drilled them last year just with the Kinto seed dressing, as with the first wheats. They yielded just as well, if not better than some of the first wheats. Though to be fair, some of that is down to soil type. Rightly or wrongly, I shall be doing the same again this year.

The seemingly never-ending spraying of oilseed rape has begun, with a dose of graminicide to tidy up volunteers. It’s clear from driving through the crop, we should now move entirely to growing hybrid varieties.

There is also a large difference where the crops where established with the plough rather than put in with the discs. I suspect this will now be the case right through to harvest. The ploughed fields seem to be more free draining than those that were disced, which now resemble rice pudding.

Once again, the early buyer has survived the rather savage upturn in fertiliser prices – a clear reaction to the spot price of wheat. It would be nice to think the fertiliser companies would know most people will have sold their wheat forward much earlier in the season, when £100/t seemed a good price – but, alas, no. They see the top price and assume we’re all rolling it in. If only this were the case.

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