Opinion: Don’t expect your sprayer to provide post-BPS answers
© Tim Scrivener It has been a particularly easy combinable harvest, but after our hottest and driest growing season to date, not one of our most bountiful.
While bludgeoning some of our late drilled, winter-ponded, summer-droughted wheat into the combine, I was watching the yield meter like a hawk.
The yo-yoing numbers reminded me of something we were taught as students – the yield pyramid, or the components of where our yield actually comes from.
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At the base of the pyramid is the stuff that contributes most to yield: drainage, background fertility and establishment.
In the middle is weed control, fertiliser and what varieties you choose to grow. At the thin end of the pyramid, contributing a minimal amount to yield, are items such as fungicides, biologicals, micronutrients and biostimulants.
We can argue about the exact order of these, but my point is that many of us are guilty of spending too much time concentrating on the stuff at the top, and not enough effort looking after the stuff at the bottom.
I remember as a fledgling agronomist, once writing a flag-leaf recommendation for the sprayer driver of a large estate.
With its different fungicide, growth regulator and herbicide combinations, it amounted to 14 different mixes and 23 A4 pages.
I’ll still do that sort of thing if you really want me to, but I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that as long as you are somewhere approaching even the ballpark of correctness, that effort would be better spent concentrating first on application timeliness, and then once you get done early, digging out some ditches.
It’s easy to see why we are so obsessive about this sort of thing when you consider that inversely related to the yield pyramid appears to be the marketing budget.
Pesticide adverts took up several acres of last week’s pages, while there wasn’t even a single advert for land drainage contractors buried in the classifieds.
To be clear, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use a fungicide – you almost certainly should. But whether you use product X or Y, agonising over whether you use a half or 60% rate, it’s probably going to make much less difference than flinging a bit of muck about.
In fact, I would go so far to say that on this drier side of the country, if cash is limiting, you’d probably be better to spend three-quarters of your fungicide and micronutrient budget on a few drainpipes through some wet holes than you would be treating wheat for septoria.
It is seasons like 2025 that demonstrate that you can’t hide the stuff at the bottom of the pyramid with diesel, nitrogen and chemistry.
With such low arable profitability at the moment, I’ve been having some difficult conversations with landlords of late.
Fortunately, the majority understand this pyramid and that the landowner has a controlling stake in many of the things of the bottom of it.
Muck and soil structure is our responsibility, but together with a neighbour, we’ve invested in a laser-guided trencher to install our own underdrainage systems. It has allowed us to be flexible, targeted and cost effective.
A post Basic Payment Scheme and Sustainable Farming Incentive world involves sustainably increasing our production.
And do you know what? I’m much happier with a surveyor’s laser-level in hand or pushing up some chicken muck than I ever am tipping yet another can of grog into the sprayer.