Farmer Focus: This year’s mighty blackgrass battle

I hope everyone has had some meaningful moisture recently. It has certainly made a difference here. This year, blackgrass in the oats was flowering by 10 April, most of it with only one leggy tiller.

So after waiting until the weather permitted, I gave all fields two passes with the comb harrow.

As well as knocking out a lot of mayweed on the headlands and blackgrass seedlings, many of the taller early plants were snapped at nodes and have not grown back.

See also: High crop yields key to better gross margins and lower emissions

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Anthony Becvar

Anthony Becvar is a third-generation farmer of an 80ha mixed farm in East Sussex on heavy Weald Clay. Crops include spring beans, winter wheat and spring barley, alongside diversification projects which include two breweries and an agricultural mechanic.

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However, in reducing this weed burden I woke Cthulhu and created a wondrous flush of rampant blackgrass.

I try to do this before drilling, but never have I achieved such successful establishment. I have a tolerance to blackgrass as we have kept numbers low in the past few years, so what had germinated must have been dormant seed.

Usually, the options would include spraying everything off, finding a wholecrop buyer or getting Mrs B and the kids to rogue like Trojans.

However, the flowering heads were sitting proud of the oats by 15-20cm; something I’ve not seen before. So I hired Kevin from Pasture Care and his Zurn Top Cut Collect.

We removed 70-80% of all blackgrass heads, as well as a lot of volunteer wheat. Although not all of the problem was removed, I depleted the seed bank.

The hope is that with a far lower seed return I won’t have to penalise myself by growing break crops for the foreseeable future. I have done this at a fraction of the cost of chemical treatment.

Growing oats, I have no real grassweed herbicide options, but had I been growing wheat, I now know that any money spent on a pre-emergence package would have been wasted as pretty much all blackgrass was spring-germinated.

I could put the lack of autumn/winter germination down to the wrong conditions, the buckwheat companion competition or my zen-like positive thinking.

But it shows that blackgrass is a fickle and finicky beast and that adaptive cultural control should be at the top of the toolbox.