West: Drilled up by the end of the month?
What a difference twelve months makes. All planned winter oilseed rape is in, bar one field and more went in than we thought due to the wheat harvest not being too late. At a guess, 75% of winter wheat and winter barley is in and a few clients have finished drilling. The last remaining combines were put away last weekend after finishing off spring beans and spring oats. Oats were a pain as the straw wouldn’t die off, so some chopped the straw to enable a quick turnaround.
Overall most are happy and/or relieved with their yields of all crops, reporting an average year where true areas have been used – by including bare patches where no crop existed. Pre-monsoon (this will stick with me for a long time!) wheat crops managed to yield 4t/acre. Winter barley crops have yielded astonishingly well and I would dearly like an explanation on this one, as I have always thought that barley crops sat in water all winter are usually lousy. The decent winter oilseed rape crops have also been pretty good, but we should have ripped more of the borderline stuff up, especially with spring rape yielding as much as 1.4t/acre.
The most disappointing yields came from the light land farms, which suffered badly in the very high temperatures in early July. Combined with the backward nature of crops at that point – 2-3 weeks behind where they would normally be – and not a lot of root mass just burnt them off, giving us poor bushel weights.
Moisture levels are just right. It was with some trepidation that I went crop walking last Thursday, with reports the day before suggesting 60-80mm rainfall for the day, which thankfully we escaped. Sorry if you were unlucky enough to suffer this insult again! We had just over an inch of rain from Monday to Friday, which stopped the min till guys, but most will probably be back on the job today (October 8), or ploughing and drilling winter barley.
The majority of wheat and barley seed has been treated with Deter (clothianidin) where clients heeded my warnings of shortages back in May and booked a tonnage early.
Winter barley crops are coming up in 7-8 days at the moment, with the most forward crops having three true leaves and where treated with Deter the majority have been sprayed with a pre-emergence herbicide. Crops are growing too quickly to be fussed by slugs, but if they carry on at this pace I can see manganese being an issue on the lighter land before too long.
As with the winter barley crops, winter wheat is also coming through very quickly – 10 days on average. The problem is that weeds are growing at the same pace, so pre-emergence sprays need to be on sharpish, especially where blackgrass is an issue and yes, we do have some over here! Most forward crops have four true leaves and these are the crops that went in after rape from the September 9.
Wheat after oilseed rape is not suffering too badly from slugs and hollowing has not been an issue due to the seed chitting within 24hrs of drilling, but we are getting some grazing and one application of pellets has, in the main, sorted. Some of the heavier, cloddy seed-beds (most crops are going in to some of the best seed-beds we have had in a while) are needing a top up and to overload the metaldeyhde active application we are using ferric phosphate pellets, which are working well.
The majority of the drilled wheat has been pre-emergence sprayed or at the point of emergence and these crops are scorched, which is hardly surprising due to the speed of growth at the moment. There are some reports of gout fly eggs on one leaf wheat. There is also talk of the maize harvest getting underway at the end of this week or the beginning of next, which will release another tranche of ground for wheat drilling. Quite a lot of land after spuds has already been sown as well.
Oilseed rape drilling got underway end of the week commencing August 12 and of course conditions have been ideal pretty much ever since. Crops with sludge cake or poultry litter, or in the case of one client, liquid fertiliser applied at the point of drilling behind the packer roller in a band now has six true leaves, but it’s not yet up to the top of my wellies. We could of course have cut the seed rate in half and still be looking at thick crops, as we are down to 40 seeds/sq m in some cases and crops are still too thick. I wish that sometimes we could have really accurate long range forecasts – tell me if there is one please! It would make judging seed rates so much easier.
After last year most decided that if rape was not in by the end of the first week of September that would be the cut off, but even these crops have 2-3 true leaves, so we could have probably carried, but as mentioned earlier, all bar one field of planned rape was in by this stage. I’m just managing to find very low levels of phoma, but nowhere near thresholds at the moment.
At the moment it looks as though we could be drilled up by the end of the month, bar what goes in after fodder beet. I am not trying to tempt fate, just a statement of fact.
