Farmer Focus: Drone helps with organic cultivation trial
© Jason Bye To be incredibly annoying to those of you who have been struggling to get autumn sowing done, we have had one of the easiest seasons for drilling winter cereals and our bean/wheat bicrop.
Seed-beds have been excellent and most of our wheat is up or just emerging.
See also: Direct-drilling wheat into clover ley saves farm £100/ha
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Our bicropped land was ploughed so was a little cloddy, but due to the dryness of the soil we were able to roll it to break a few of the more stubborn lumps.
This is a first in bean-sowing history at Shimpling Park Farm.
We’ve also been putting our Agri-EPI drone and Skippy Scout software to use with our three new trials for harvest 2023 – two for other people and one for ourselves.
Our own farm trial is looking at seed rates in winter and spring crops, focusing on the effect of reduced cultivations, weed suppression, disease, row spacing, quality and yield.
For winter wheat, we will be comparing target plant populations of between 250 plants/sq m and 325 plants/sq m.
For our winter bean/bicrop, we will compare the low end of 188 plants/sq m of wheat and 15 plants/sq m of beans up to 233 plants/sq m and 21 plants/sq m, respectively.
Each assessment spot can be repeated by Skippy Scout at regular intervals, counting the plants and identifying weedy areas.
The trial will, hopefully, help us understand the effect of fewer cultivations with higher seed rates and vice versa.
In addition, we want to understand the effect of higher plant populations and the suppression of weeds, the effects on tiller numbers and disease on a wide row spacing, and finally quality and yield.Â
I also have another event suggestion that you may like to attend. It’s called EA Sustain, happening on 14/15 January 2023.
It purports to be the first conference to bring together environment, culture and entrepreneurship. Hot topics for post-BPS resilience?
