With commodity prices as they are it may be sensible to look closer at direct drilling in some situations.Who has found machinery to cope , and how did you approach the task?

Hi In 1995 we had a demo of a JD 750a no till and were so impressed with the job it done we bought it. It,s not as easy as every one seems to think going down the direct drill route. Buying a direct drill is only part of the job the most important thing is to get your cropping right. Compaction is another concern ie keeping harvest traffic on the headlands, and what approach you are going to take with the straw.Blackgrass and sterile brome is another problem we are starting to see. I dont know what other direct drills are like but when you get soil sticking to your boots when you walk on your field . Forget thinking about going direct drilling,unless you want to spend hours digging it out of the press wheels. But in the dry the drill will cut through just about anything,and place the seed first class. The thing i like most about the drill is the way the coulters follow the ground placing the seed at the depth you want not in and out of the ground like some of the drills on the market. We also run a mulch finisher so if we have a lot of surface trash we can run through first with this.

We are direct drilling about 30-40% of our crops (wheat, osr, beans & barley) After the combine comes out of the field we make one or two passes with our mulch-harrow (details available on request..!) to spread the straw and chaff. At this point the decision is made whether it will be possible to direct drill or wheter it will be necessary to cultivate and create a stale seedbed. In most cases if the straw has been baled or we are following a break crop it should be possible to direct drill so long as the soil structure is OK. Where there is a lot of straw some form of incorporation is often necessary - only working the top 50-75mm - best tool I have seen to date is the Vaderstad Carrier. On land that we have been direct drilling for 4 years or more the worm activity is such that the soil becomes much easier to work. So far as drill type is concerned I think they all work well when conditions are suitable. We have used a John Deere which did a good job until it got wet then it tended to clog up and leave the slot open - this was under conditions that you would not have done much of a job with a plough and a combination drill. We tried a Moore but again not so good in the wet or if the seedbed was too loose after discing. We finally purchased a Kuhn because we have a good local dealer and have had several Kuhn ploughs, drills, power harrows and discs which have proved to be very satisfactory. Also at the time of purchase an ex-demo machine was available and JD did not have a 4 metre machine available.!! Now I don't know what I would buy, I have seen some very good crops established with the Amazone DD and also the Vaderstad drill, fitted with the system-disc. Kuhn seem to be going away from direct drilling with their latest drill the Fastliner, and I understand that JD are in the throws producing some new drill systems. I feel we have reached the stage with direct drilling that we were at with baled silage before the bale wrapper was invented - we need a brekthrough in drill design...

Have a look at John Dale direct drills. www.daledrills.com Good drills at a very good cost.

Jim, may I be so bold as to suggest that the break through with drill design is to use a tine to place the seed, no hairpinning the straw, using the Horsch foot the seed is not placed at the very bottom of the cultivated layer but in a band either side of a deeper working point allowing drainage and root penetration, and the band sowing giving every seed space to grow. Can you tell which drill we bought last autumn? and that we are happy with the results????!! Guy. P.S. I agree with what you have to say about worm activity on non inverted land and it does start to work more easily.

Andrew,I've experimented with D/Drilling with the horsch,All these drills will do the job but in my experience on our soil type its allways at the expense of yield.2 years ago we drilled quite an acreage of wosr.These crop establishment were excellent but by Dec the crops were starting to run out of steam due to poor rooting.It was a wet winter but i lost confidence in the tecnique and have returned to losenning the soil before drilling.I mean if you are satisfied with 15-20 cwt D/D the job,i also drilled alot of linseed with a jd no till this was succesfull but it was a subsidy exersise. but with AA payments on the level now i feel you must push the crop for maximum yield even more so than ever.Just my experiences D/D probally works for the rest of you.

I have to admitt I have never seen a Horsch machine in action, or a crop that one has drilled. I went to see one demonstrated the other day, sadly it didn't move whilst we were on the demo site, but we liked the simplicity of design and lack of moving parts, I am open to being converted...

Simon, did you apply any autumn nitrogen, i am adapting our drill to apply / incorporate sprays eg treflan, crystal etc or put homebrew urea down under the coulters with my own design of system in certain situations.

I cannot claim any experience of direct drilling but I am interested by the comments on autumn nitrogen. 'Looking over the fence', as you might say, the fact that most of the DDers that I see are putting very large amounts of autumn nitrogen on (which is a total environmental no-no) seems to go unnoticed and unremarked upon. Time to come clean about the real environmental impact of DD and min-till? I do plough everything myself, but only because of a high proportion of root crops and a relatively small scale which makes running two sets of equipment uneconomic. Not opposed to DD/min-till on principle, just sceptical about the overall benefits - our soil could well be ideal for it. It's good for sales of high horsepower tractors though, isn't it?! Andrew Manfield

Andrew, i suspect the energy and pollution saved in a direct drill operation more than compensates for the possible environmental effect of higher nitrate pollution. Lets not forget that the scientists cannot all agree whether nitrates are really good or bad for us.As for horsepower, i think drills such as the Moore, Kuhn ,Dale, Horsch and JD all of which claim direct capability are a lot easier to pull than some of the min- till favourites such as the Vaderstad, Simba etc.In some countries direct or scratch tillage may be subsidised by govt or industry in future in the form of area aid or carbon credits.In my opinion the d/d argument falls down slightly in the chemical arena- more slug pellets, blackgrass sprays etc may be needed?

The best direct drill seems to me to be the latest one that is on the market! Each time a new drill comes out we get these 'dedicated followers of fashion' going out and buying the newest version. There is a chap near to us who direct drilled everything for a few years and then last year went back to the plough because he was over run with sterile brome. There used to be a craze for buying Bettinson and Fergi direct drills in the late 70's, that died a death didn't it! Are you seriously telling me that a 400hp tractor pulling a 3m solo is better for the environment than my David Brown 1590 pulling 4 furrows? I would like to compare fuel usage on that one!!

Andrew,no i did not use N.My policy now is to use poultry litter on osr crops they never look back. Very intrested to hear about your spray conversion for the Horcsh,where are you mounting the spray boom,what water volume will you use?

Fuel usage from Ploughing, Power harrowing, rolling, possibly subsoiling is far more than going over the soil once with one machine.

Yes simplicity suits us well!!! and there aren't many grease nipples to deal with, I would recommend seeing one work to understand the seed placement and going to look at some growing crops to see the band effect. If anyone wants to have a look and are in or near Kent just reply.

Jim,there's 6 horschs working in a 25 mile radius of your farm!

Simon, i am mounting a detachable front tank on the tractor weightbox then using an electric flojet type 12v pump to push either fert or chems[or both] back to the drill.The pump will run continuously in work with flow to the jets or coulters being controlled by a Burgess trip switch on the rear lift frame allowing liquid to flow or shut off as the drill is lifted or lowered .To change from chems to fert i will simply swap the feed pipe over to a pre- installed line on the drill.For fert only jobs I have made a manifold up with 16 metered outlets that feed down to the drill coulters using the same pressure guage throughout.I will mount 8 sprayjets on the rear harrow area for application of pre- ems etc and possibly another 8 under the frame at the front end of the drill for incorporating chems and fert together at the same time.It sounds a silly way of complicating drilling but i have done it before on a Rapid with excellent results, mixing urea and treflan together or Avadex liquid.Also since i have no one else available it means more gets done with less tractors at drilling time.I think that we will be moving more to pre-em sprays for blackgrass control in future so why not do it at drilling, since the drill packer wheels will have firmed up the seedbed anyway.Like most things it will only work if you really want to make it happen.I normally use 80 to 100l/ha for chems maybe more for urea ferts. I have used 1102/3 turbo teejets on the drill spraybar successfully.Cost i estimate at £1000.

You either plough it to release the N by mineralisation or you stick it on with your drill or spreader the choice is yours. Largest N polluters are "Organic" farmers who plough in lots of compost, clover etc, not so bad if spring ploughed admittedly. We can see the difference when ploughing against min-tilling winter barley but we don't apply any N UNTIL we see some yellowing which shows you that the crop has a requirement (this will of course contravene NVZ rules no doubt)

Jim we are going to be constructing our own Chaff harrow affair any tips or are they commercially sensitive :) Will be based around folding pressure harrow frame with 3 or 4 rows of tines attached we will probably use big following harrow tines and make them adjustable for angle? as for spacing it's anyones guess!!!!

Andrew,this is very intresting,can you mix prebane/crystal with liquid urea?you are right pre-em is the way forward when it comes to blackgrass control

Cant say i have tried mixing those two,but stick one in a bucket and try adding liquid N.I take the view that as N20 is mostly water it should be reasonably mix friendly.Some of the liquid fert manufacturers have possibly tried it.I have heard of people adding solid avadex to suspension fert and rapeseed has been applied with fert as well!!I would recommend immediate use for any mix to be safe.I think Omex have quite a bit of experience with different mixes.

The Horsch is not marketed as a direct drill, and on properly heavy land could not possibly be expected to function as such. One direct drill that has impressed me for heavy land is the Amazone Airstar Primera. No rubber press wheels to stop you when the conditions are anything less than perfect, excellent contour following ability, and still with excellent seed-to-soil contact. Still use my Bettinson 3D occasionally. Nothing to go wrong, apart from the odd perished seed pipe!

Email me on jim.bullock@farmersweekly.net and I will email you a pic and some details..

I meant occasional use really Tim ,but my feeling is that on our Windsor series clays almost anything will struggle in a direct situation whether in rock hard or bog wet going at times so there is no point gearing up totally for that route.I prefer to hope that our Horsch might have a role to play in certain conditions, but specialist drills may be contracted in for difficult situations ,assuming other factors such as soil structure etc are favourable.Do you have experience of the Primera in the wet for example?If i was buying again i would look closely at the Dale drill.

The HORSCH CO series are capable of direct drilling into all soil types if conditions are half decent, weve tried direct drilling differnt crops this year with one and so far so good !

Our contractor drilled grass after maize last November using a Krause direct drill, it did a bloody good job and we had good establishment considering there was standing water in some parts of the field, the spacing is too wide for grass but thats contractors for you, they will take on work even if thier kit isn't ideal for the job