Article taken from the Arable Farming
This harvest, Essex grower Tom Bradshaw’s winter wheat has averaged 9.75 tonnes per hectare. But where there was bad black-grass, the combine yield meter reading was more likely to be 6.55t/ha – a stark reminder of the weed’s impact.
Mr Bradshaw – who is also a Nuffield scholar and currently an HGCA arable monitor farmer – farms just over 1,600 hectares from his base on the family farm at Fletchers Farm, Fordham, near Colchester. Some 65-70% of the land he farms is on Hanslope Series chalky boulder clay, a soil type which can grow a very good crop of wheat but will equally grow a very good stand of black-grass, he says.
Apart from a small area of owned land, most is farmed under a number of contract arrangements. While black-grass has been present across the farms, it has not reached the crippling levels seen in some parts of the eastern counties, say Mr Bradshaw.
But there have been two key events which more recently have tipped the balance in black-grass’ favour, he believes.
The first was the apparently sudden development of resistance to ALS herbicides in the black-grass population on one of the farms.
“We went from IPU working to Atlantis resistance within two years on one farm and that was a farm with a very low black-grass population. It happened very, very quickly; there was no in-between,” says Mr Bradshaw.
The second factor was the difficult 2012/2013 season, which proved to be something of a watershed in terms of black-grass control.
“Oilseed rape crops in 2013 were very uncompetitive in general and what we found after that was our worst black-grass in 2014 was after poor oilseed rape.
“We ripped up a lot of our rape and looking back I’m delighted we did because where we left poor rape is where we’ve got bad black-grass control and it’s come through into first wheats in 2014.”
Although each farm has its own rotation, a typical approach has been OSR, two wheats, beans, two wheats. Oilseed rape has been seen as the core cleaning crop.
“Because with Carbetamide and Kerb there has been an opportunity to change the actives and be able to get fairly good levels of control.
“My concern is as populations of black-grass are increasing, it is difficult to get 100% control and so we are going from having completely clean crops after rape, to now not having complete control where there are heavy populations of black-grass.
“Some of last year’s first wheat after oilseed rape had black-grass in it. That is now going into spring barley because I just don’t believe I can take the risk of putting it into a second wheat.”
Rotation
Winter beans no longer have a place in the rotation following the removal of simazine, he adds. “I just think broad-leaved control in winter beans is incredibly difficult. And then you are still relying on Kerb as you do in oilseed rape.”
However, spring beans do give a black-grass control break and they, along with spring barley, a small area of sugar beet and for the first time, for harvest 2015, spring wheat (Mulika) are part of the growing acreage of spring crops in the farm’s rotations.
“Financially, in the immediate short-term, it really is the right thing to do. However, it brings a whole new challenge in that I think black-grass control is a five-year programme and when you are contract farming other peoples’ land, you have not got security of tenure. I farm the land like we are going to farm it forever; that’s my philosophy. Because if we farm it as though we are only going to farm it for the next three years, we are preparing to fail.”
Delaying drilling
He is more at ease with the idea of spring cropping than he is with another black-grass control tool – delaying drilling.
“Late drilling on our land is a huge, huge risk. We have seen that in three of the last drilling has been very challenging because you end up not getting a competitive crop of wheat established. And actually the competitiveness of the wheat crop has a huge role to play in reducing black-grass numbers.
“To a degree we will wait for drilling, we might not drill anything until September 25 but we will aim to have it all drilled by October 10. I believe once you get beyond that time you are taking such a risk in terms of not getting the crop well established, not having a high yielding crop and then not having an economic return.
“But that then means spring crops have got to be part of the answer to the black-grass question. People throw out the line ‘you can’t grow spring crops on heavy land.’ I don’t think for one moment it is easy to grow spring crops on heavy land but it is possible, I’m convinced of that and we have got to learn.”
With resistance in post-emergence contact herbicides an issue, the farm’s approach to chemical control not surprisingly includes a robust pre-emergence treatment.
“We have been stacking pre-ems as you would imagine but I would say over the last four years that has increased and it is trying to work out where you get the biggest bang for your buck, accepting you are spending about £100/ha on your pre-em control.
“Anywhere we think we’ve got black-grass is having Avadex as part of the programme, it is only the very cleanest fields where we are not putting Avadex on. But it is not the answer on its own, it’s just bringing another 10-15% as part of a programme on top of Crystal+DFF or Liberator+PDM.”
Spray application has also received attention.
“We invested in a sprayer last year we felt had the best boom control on the market. To control boom height down to below 0.5m across a 36m boom is incredibly difficult but with the Horsch Leeb sprayer we can get down to 30cm.”
Cultivations are focused on the all-important 50mm band at the soil surface.
“After first wheats we are aiming to cultivate in the zone. We are using a [Vaderstad] TopDown and we’ve got some points on it which we can work very shallow.”
A Cousins Surface cultivator was demo-ed during early September and was very impressive, says Mr Bradshaw.
“Having seen the machine working one verything from stubbles to ploughed ground we think it could have an important role to play, I don’t see it as just a stubble cultivator,” says Mr Bradshaw.
Second wheats are also established using the TopDown.
“Min-till second wheats are a more risky proposition than a shallow-cultivated first wheat. It brings into question the role of second wheats in the rotation and that is where we’ve got to at the moment.
“In the longer term, I think they will be replaced by spring crops but we are not there this year. At the moment when I look at all our margins I’ve compared second wheat and spring barley on our highest yielding farm and financially, where I’ve had both crops in the rotation over the last five years, on average the spring barley had paid a better return than the second wheat.”
Spring cropping
One of the drivers behind making the most of spring cropping, he says, is to make his heavy land more workable.
“The long term aim is achieving good spring crop yields on heavy land – routinely. You cannot have heavy land sat there wet all winter and then expect to get on it in the spring and get a decent crop out of it.”
Cover crops are part of the solution, he believes, potentially offering soil structure, organic matter and all-important black-grass control benefits.
“We have got some cover crops drilled now [August 29], we have got some more to drill next week. I do think we have to be careful. One of the things highlighted in the Agrovista work at Lamport* was there is a balance between trying to get a really vigorous cover crop established in early August but then shading out the black-grass and not getting the black-grass germination.
“Because when you do drill in the spring and you destroy that cover crop there is a danger the black-grass will germinate then.
“We purposely want something that is not that aggressive and grows quite open and we do not wat to drill it too early but its trial and error. We are doing a lot of half fields. Some are going to be direct drilled, while in some half the field has been (Sumo) Trio-ed and half the field has been (Simba) Cultipress-ed with a tine drill with the cover crop mix and the other half has been left.
“We are learning with cover crops. Three years ago we grew some fantastic cover crops and I thought we had cracked it. Two years ago we had a cold, wet autumn, cover crops here inches high and I thought ‘well, that’s just a waste of money’. Last year we didn’t use any cover crops because of the previous autumn, they were so poor I lost a bit of courage.
“Who knows how well we will do this year? We’ve got about 80ha going in of mainly vetch and black oat mixtures.”
EFAs
The introduction of Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs) under recent CAP reforms also boosts the case for cover crops, believes Mr Bradshaw.
“It is in our interest to have a catch or a cover crop because that qualifies for our EFA area, so there is then a financial reason to do it. I think in the long run, every spring crop will have a cover crop in front of it but I’m not brave enough to do that until we learn how to drill the spring crop successfully into the cover crop. And that comes down to the machinery.
“I don’t want to move the ground again before spring. If we’ve got the stale seedbed effectively and then we go in again and turn it over or disc it, we have potentially got another population of black-grass.”
One question he put to Agrovista, which is supply this season’s Chlorofiltre 25 and Chlorofiltre 26 cover crops, was what percentage spring wheat establishment did they achieve in the trials at their Lamport, Northants trials site after fallow as opposed to a cover crop?
“The answer was there was lower establishment where the cover crop was. It is just a little bit more difficult to get the correct seed to soil contact and it is things like that we need to manage,” says Mr Bradshaw.
Cover crops
Of the 303ha of spring crops going in the ground for harvest 2015, 80h will be preceded by cover crops, which will be sprayed off next spring and drilled straight into.
The timing of spraying off will depend to a large extent on winter wheat, says Agrovista agronomist Simon Pretty.
“If we have a winter like we just have they will grow all winter and I suspect we will have to spray twice. I think we will spray the cover crop off and I suspect there could be a sub-population of black-grass underneath, which we have got to be prepared for.”
Planned drilling dates for spring crops will also influence spraying-off timing, adds Mr Bradshaw.
“I will work backwards from the middle of March. My usual spring barley drilling window is March 10 to March 15-ish, there is no way we will not have the cover crops sprayed off by middle of February. I want at least four weeks.
“I’d probably like to have them sprayed off by the middle of January, so they die back and the wind and the sun gets a chance to get to the soil and just dry it out a bit. I saw some heavy ground this year that had cover crops on it in April and it was just a pudding.
“If we can spray it off by the middle of January they have got two months to senesce.”
The next part of the jigsaw is to devise herbicide plans for the spring crops. Avadex is once again an option but over-reliance on it is a concern, says Mr Bradshaw.
This harvest, Essex grower Tom Bradshaw’s winter wheat has averaged 9.75 tonnes per hectare. But where there was bad black-grass, the combine yield meter reading was more likely to be 6.55t/ha – a stark reminder of the weed’s impact.
Mr Bradshaw – who is also a Nuffield scholar and currently an HGCA arable monitor farmer – farms just over 1,600 hectares from his base on the family farm at Fletchers Farm, Fordham, near Colchester. Some 65-70% of the land he farms is on Hanslope Series chalky boulder clay, a soil type which can grow a very good crop of wheat but will equally grow a very good stand of black-grass, he says.
Apart from a small area of owned land, most is farmed under a number of contract arrangements. While black-grass has been present across the farms, it has not reached the crippling levels seen in some parts of the eastern counties, say Mr Bradshaw.
But there have been two key events which more recently have tipped the balance in black-grass’ favour, he believes.
The first was the apparently sudden development of resistance to ALS herbicides in the black-grass population on one of the farms.
“We went from IPU working to Atlantis resistance within two years on one farm and that was a farm with a very low black-grass population. It happened very, very quickly; there was no in-between,” says Mr Bradshaw.
The second factor was the difficult 2012/2013 season, which proved to be something of a watershed in terms of black-grass control.
“Oilseed rape crops in 2013 were very uncompetitive in general and what we found after that was our worst black-grass in 2014 was after poor oilseed rape.
“We ripped up a lot of our rape and looking back I’m delighted we did because where we left poor rape is where we’ve got bad black-grass control and it’s come through into first wheats in 2014.”
Although each farm has its own rotation, a typical approach has been OSR, two wheats, beans, two wheats. Oilseed rape has been seen as the core cleaning crop.
“Because with Carbetamide and Kerb there has been an opportunity to change the actives and be able to get fairly good levels of control.
“My concern is as populations of black-grass are increasing, it is difficult to get 100% control and so we are going from having completely clean crops after rape, to now not having complete control where there are heavy populations of black-grass.
“Some of last year’s first wheat after oilseed rape had black-grass in it. That is now going into spring barley because I just don’t believe I can take the risk of putting it into a second wheat.”
Rotation
Winter beans no longer have a place in the rotation following the removal of simazine, he adds. “I just think broad-leaved control in winter beans is incredibly difficult. And then you are still relying on Kerb as you do in oilseed rape.”
However, spring beans do give a black-grass control break and they, along with spring barley, a small area of sugar beet and for the first time, for harvest 2015, spring wheat (Mulika) are part of the growing acreage of spring crops in the farm’s rotations.
“Financially, in the immediate short-term, it really is the right thing to do. However, it brings a whole new challenge in that I think black-grass control is a five-year programme and when you are contract farming other peoples’ land, you have not got security of tenure. I farm the land like we are going to farm it forever; that’s my philosophy. Because if we farm it as though we are only going to farm it for the next three years, we are preparing to fail.”
Delaying drilling
He is more at ease with the idea of spring cropping than he is with another black-grass control tool – delaying drilling.
“Late drilling on our land is a huge, huge risk. We have seen that in three of the last drilling has been very challenging because you end up not getting a competitive crop of wheat established. And actually the competitiveness of the wheat crop has a huge role to play in reducing black-grass numbers.
“To a degree we will wait for drilling, we might not drill anything until September 25 but we will aim to have it all drilled by October 10. I believe once you get beyond that time you are taking such a risk in terms of not getting the crop well established, not having a high yielding crop and then not having an economic return.
“But that then means spring crops have got to be part of the answer to the black-grass question. People throw out the line ‘you can’t grow spring crops on heavy land.’ I don’t think for one moment it is easy to grow spring crops on heavy land but it is possible, I’m convinced of that and we have got to learn.”
With resistance in post-emergence contact herbicides an issue, the farm’s approach to chemical control not surprisingly includes a robust pre-emergence treatment.
“We have been stacking pre-ems as you would imagine but I would say over the last four years that has increased and it is trying to work out where you get the biggest bang for your buck, accepting you are spending about £100/ha on your pre-em control.
“Anywhere we think we’ve got black-grass is having Avadex as part of the programme, it is only the very cleanest fields where we are not putting Avadex on. But it is not the answer on its own, it’s just bringing another 10-15% as part of a programme on top of Crystal+DFF or Liberator+PDM.”
Spray application has also received attention.
“We invested in a sprayer last year we felt had the best boom control on the market. To control boom height down to below 0.5m across a 36m boom is incredibly difficult but with the Horsch Leeb sprayer we can get down to 30cm.”
Cultivations are focused on the all-important 50mm band at the soil surface.
“After first wheats we are aiming to cultivate in the zone. We are using a [Vaderstad] TopDown and we’ve got some points on it which we can work very shallow.”
A Cousins Surface cultivator was demo-ed during early September and was very impressive, says Mr Bradshaw.
“Having seen the machine working one verything from stubbles to ploughed ground we think it could have an important role to play, I don’t see it as just a stubble cultivator,” says Mr Bradshaw.
Second wheats are also established using the TopDown.
“Min-till second wheats are a more risky proposition than a shallow-cultivated first wheat. It brings into question the role of second wheats in the rotation and that is where we’ve got to at the moment.
“In the longer term, I think they will be replaced by spring crops but we are not there this year. At the moment when I look at all our margins I’ve compared second wheat and spring barley on our highest yielding farm and financially, where I’ve had both crops in the rotation over the last five years, on average the spring barley had paid a better return than the second wheat.”
Spring cropping
One of the drivers behind making the most of spring cropping, he says, is to make his heavy land more workable.
“The long term aim is achieving good spring crop yields on heavy land – routinely. You cannot have heavy land sat there wet all winter and then expect to get on it in the spring and get a decent crop out of it.”
Cover crops are part of the solution, he believes, potentially offering soil structure, organic matter and all-important black-grass control benefits.
“We have got some cover crops drilled now [August 29], we have got some more to drill next week. I do think we have to be careful. One of the things highlighted in the Agrovista work at Lamport* was there is a balance between trying to get a really vigorous cover crop established in early August but then shading out the black-grass and not getting the black-grass germination.
“Because when you do drill in the spring and you destroy that cover crop there is a danger the black-grass will germinate then.
“We purposely want something that is not that aggressive and grows quite open and we do not wat to drill it too early but its trial and error. We are doing a lot of half fields. Some are going to be direct drilled, while in some half the field has been (Sumo) Trio-ed and half the field has been (Simba) Cultipress-ed with a tine drill with the cover crop mix and the other half has been left.
“We are learning with cover crops. Three years ago we grew some fantastic cover crops and I thought we had cracked it. Two years ago we had a cold, wet autumn, cover crops here inches high and I thought ‘well, that’s just a waste of money’. Last year we didn’t use any cover crops because of the previous autumn, they were so poor I lost a bit of courage.
“Who knows how well we will do this year? We’ve got about 80ha going in of mainly vetch and black oat mixtures.”
EFAs
The introduction of Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs) under recent CAP reforms also boosts the case for cover crops, believes Mr Bradshaw.
“It is in our interest to have a catch or a cover crop because that qualifies for our EFA area, so there is then a financial reason to do it. I think in the long run, every spring crop will have a cover crop in front of it but I’m not brave enough to do that until we learn how to drill the spring crop successfully into the cover crop. And that comes down to the machinery.
“I don’t want to move the ground again before spring. If we’ve got the stale seedbed effectively and then we go in again and turn it over or disc it, we have potentially got another population of black-grass.”
One question he put to Agrovista, which is supply this season’s Chlorofiltre 25 and Chlorofiltre 26 cover crops, was what percentage spring wheat establishment did they achieve in the trials at their Lamport, Northants trials site after fallow as opposed to a cover crop?
“The answer was there was lower establishment where the cover crop was. It is just a little bit more difficult to get the correct seed to soil contact and it is things like that we need to manage,” says Mr Bradshaw.
Cover crops
Of the 303ha of spring crops going in the ground for harvest 2015, 80h will be preceded by cover crops, which will be sprayed off next spring and drilled straight into.
The timing of spraying off will depend to a large extent on winter wheat, says Agrovista agronomist Simon Pretty.
“If we have a winter like we just have they will grow all winter and I suspect we will have to spray twice. I think we will spray the cover crop off and I suspect there could be a sub-population of black-grass underneath, which we have got to be prepared for.”
Planned drilling dates for spring crops will also influence spraying-off timing, adds Mr Bradshaw.
“I will work backwards from the middle of March. My usual spring barley drilling window is March 10 to March 15-ish, there is no way we will not have the cover crops sprayed off by middle of February. I want at least four weeks.
“I’d probably like to have them sprayed off by the middle of January, so they die back and the wind and the sun gets a chance to get to the soil and just dry it out a bit. I saw some heavy ground this year that had cover crops on it in April and it was just a pudding.
“If we can spray it off by the middle of January they have got two months to senesce.”
The next part of the jigsaw is to devise herbicide plans for the spring crops. Avadex is once again an option but over-reliance on it is a concern, says Mr Bradshaw.