Farmer Focus: Drilling earlier in dry conditions saves fuel

Usually I don’t even start to think about drilling winter wheat until the end of October, as the blackgrass usually likes to germinate in mid-October.

This year, however, is different due to the extremely dry weather. I decided to drill all of my winter wheat in the first week of October.

See also: How agroforestry can help build a farm’s climate resilience

About the author

Mark Stubbs

Mark Stubbs manages his 700ha family arable farm in Lincolnshire, in partnership with his parents. The farm grows wheat, malting barley, oilseed rape, linseed and cover crops. Mark won the highest yielding winter wheat crop in the 2024 YEN awards.

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My reasons were because it had been that dry on my farm not a lot of blackgrass had or was going to germinate, so I thought I would take advantage of the dry conditions and make drilling go easily.

This proved to be a good idea for fuel consumption as usually we use between 4-5 litres/acre to drill wheat, but because of the dry soil there was less resistance in pulling the drill which meant our consumption was down to just 3 litres/acre. With today’s high fuel prices this is very important.

My choice of varieties this year are Bamford for soft biscuit quality, Arnie to achieve possible milling quality, but I’m treating it as a high-yielding feed to go alongside with my other high-yielding feed varieties of Scope, Bamford and Defiance.

All five varieties were drilled at 500 seeds/sq m so I get the guaranteed plant count in the spring and not have to rely on a lot of tillering for my ear numbers. Due to our cold climate on the Lincolnshire Wolds we can lose a lot of tillers in the spring.

The rolls were tight behind the drill making sure we had a firm seed-bed to try to reduce the risk of slugs and achieve good seed to soil contact.

I was then tight behind the rolls with the sprayer with my pre-emergence herbicide of Cougar (diflufenican + flufenacet) at 0.6 litres/ha with Fundartis ( beflubutamid + bixlozone) at 1 litre/ha added to it as well.

This will be followed up with a post-emergence spray of Sovorna (cinmethylin + picolinafen) at 1.25 litres/ha with a bit of Bandur (aclonifen) added at 0.4 litres/ha.

Unfortunately, this gives me a total spend of £125/ha on blackgrass herbicides, but that is cheap to prevent a weed which can cost you 3t/ha in yield of wheat. At £200/t this is £600/ha loss if we let blackgrass take control.