A Kent farm manager is pleasantly surprised with his yields of winter beans, which matched his five-year average despite such a dry spring. 

Tim Keir is the farm manager at Chislet Court Farm, near Thanet. He had doubts on the performance of his harvest due to the drought conditions.

“The Vespa winter beans have performed well so far, giving average yields of 4.5t/ha which is in line with our five-year average,” says Tim.

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The 60ha crop of winter beans were drilled in the last week of October, one of the key break crops along with oilseed rape in his cereal rotation.

Tim drilled the beans on moisture retentive soils which allowed them to perform well and reduced the disease pressure.

“It’s an alternative break crop for the rotation – it reduces grassweed pressure and enhances the nutrients added to the soils,” says Tim.

Winter beans fit in well in the farm’s rotation, being drilled after wheat to break up the soils and are a low-input crop which helps to reduce workload.

The arable farm will be operating more than 1,200ha next harvest and is on 60% marshland soils, with some silty clay loam and gravely ground.

Other crops

Tim has nearly finished his wheat harvest and is pleased with his milling wheat yields averaging 10t/ha alongside the milling specifications.

However, the wheat grown on gravely ground struggled, producing yields barely making 3t/ha in places.

This is due to the light soils being unable to hold moisture, stunting the growth of the crops with the little rain this season.

The milling variety Cheer was grown for the first time this year on more than 70ha of moisture retentive soils and has been successful.

Yields have been averaging 11.1t/ha with proteins hitting 13.3%.

This year, Chislet Court was involved in a trial with seed merchant T Denne and Sons and agronomy group Zantra.

They also trialled new milling variety Vibe, which produced very similar results to the Cheer.

“I will definitely be planting both Cheer and Vibe again next year,” says Tim. 

Tim grew 40ha of OSR this year of the variety, Maverick which performed very well averaging 5.3t/ha.

“It has been a particularly good year for OSR locally, and definitely a crop we will continue to grow next year” says Tim.