Farmer Focus: Worst maize yields just 20% of budgeted crop
© Tim Scrivener Thankfully, it did eventually rain here – 55mm in August made it the wettest month since February. This will save the day for sugar beet, and it will certainly help the recently sown cover crops and grass to germinate.
I fear that it came much too late to make any significant impact on the yield of forage maize. It could just help the few cobs that are there to fill, and it will definitely now delay the harvest.
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Some of the worst and undoubtedly dead crop was actually harvested in the third week of August.
Delivering only 20% of our budgeted yield, that certainly made for a depressing couple of days.
Even so, it’s not my worst ever crop of forage maize. I remember the calamitous organic crop a few years ago that produced a couple of exceptionally expensive trailer loads from a 16ha field.
My memory fades, but I have a dim recollection that one of the two trailers had to be dumped somewhere out of the way because the deadly nightshade had taken over that side of the field.
Amazing how tricky, risky and expensive farming can be.
Now that we have had an element of moisture, we can attempt to finalise next year’s cropping plans.
We are going to have to look even harder at the figures associated with growing each of the crops.
Is it to be a further reduction in inputs, in a vain attempt to reduce cost? Or should we push everything as hard as we can to maximise output?
Given our soil type and experience of yet another year with not enough moisture, it is probably going to be the former. This is certainly the case for our cereals.
The other crops will depend on just how much water we can harvest from the river this winter and store in the reservoirs.
