Ron Duncan
Ron Duncan
Ron Duncan farms 222ha
(550 acres) in partnership
with his wife and eldest son
at Begrow Farms, Duffus,
Elgin, Moray. Crops include
winter wheat, spring barley,
swedes and beetroot,
alongside a pedigree
Limousin suckler herd
LOOKING back on my last contribution, I was waxing lyrical about the ease of breaking down freshly ploughed land.
Well, things changed fairly rapidly. Continuous sunshine for the following five weeks turned the heavy land into concrete, making life a bit more expensive and a lot less comfortable. FW recently ran an article on "robots" and driverless tractors – I wish I had had one on demonstration for the first pass with the discs across the ploughing. That was really hard on the posterior.
I tried to find out from our local Met Office at RAF Kinloss just how many hours of sunshine we have had, but unfortunately I wont find out until the end of April, after this article has gone to press. However, I suspect we have had more in the past five weeks than we had all of last summer. With only 15mm of rain in the month a good "steep" now would be beneficial.
Everything is sown including areas that have been too wet to drill for the past two years. The oilseed rape in the area is already a brilliant yellow and winter wheat is moving through growth stages at an alarming rate. Ours is at GS32, having had a herbicide and pgr mix of 1.25 litres/ha of Oxytril CM (ioxynil + bromoxynil), 1.5 litres/ha Duplosan (mecoprop-p) and 2.3 litres/ha of Cycocel (chlormequat + choline chloride) last week. That was the cheapest option to control everything and it will shortly be followed by a fungicide.
We like to top-dress spring barley as soon as we see tramlines, so that is keeping my son occupied at the moment. He has carefully calculated rates for malting, allowing for previous cropping, including grazed-off turnips, and FYM applications, aiming for a 100kg/ha (80 units/acre) total of N.
We are considering changing a tractor, hard to justify at present but we will have to refresh some of our geriatric fleet before long. Lets hope for an easy harvest with satisfactory yields. *
"Oh for a robot tractor driver" says Ron Duncan after working down hard-as-concrete heavy land in Morayshire.