Who's bottled it ?

delilah said:

There is no public good in using public money to favour one form of crop establishment over others. It really is that simple.

Link to this thread, and the other one where folks are still trying to decide what constitutes DD, being emailed to Janet. Still holding out hope that at the 11th hour sanity will prevail.

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delilah said:

There is no public good in using public money to favour one form of crop establishment over others. It really is that simple.

Link to this thread, and the other one where folks are still trying to decide what constitutes DD, being emailed to Janet. Still holding out hope that at the 11th hour sanity will prevail.

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Grass And Grain said:

I both agree and disagree with you Delilah.

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Adeptandy said:

Good for you, this attitude is just why farmers will never be able to work together for the common good of the industry. Let’s all carry on with the old stereotypes of arable vs grass and not try anything new or consider anyone else’s views.

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Grass And Grain said:

I'm inclined to disagree with the availability of a DD payment within SFI. I can also see the argument for having a DD payment, but personally I'd vote against it.

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delilah said:

I don't have a view on DD. Not once on here have I criticized DD as a method of crop establishment .

What I do have a view on, as an environmental campaigner and as a taxpayer, is the use of public money on stuff that will produce no public good.

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Adeptandy said:

So increased bird numbers and reduced degradation of peat soils are no longer a public good
No longer using insecticides then isn't a public good, as an environmental campaigner I would have thought this would have been a plus for you

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Two Tone said:

DD’d Light land and Boy’s land is fine. I actually found some Bazooka Winter Barley coming into Awn and Ear emergence today.

However, Heavy land drilled the same day is very reluctant to move and is only 2-4 inches tall.
I’ve drilled Barley Direct this Spring using a Horsch CO3 with Metcalfe 50mm wide tines and has done an amazing job.
Most was direct into stubble that should have been Winter Beans. But I’ll need the straw.
The rest was patching into failed Winter Barley, which I think it has made an even better job of!

The Jury is out as to where I go from here.
I’m a one man band and if DD works, which up until last Autumn it has, it is ideal for me.
But if we get more Autumns, leading to Winters like this one, decisions will need to be made.


At the moment, my thoughts are these:

ASAP after harvest, All land that needs it will be Weaving LD subsoiled, providing it is dry enough.

There will be no more Break crops other than a few extraordinary situations where the odd Beans crop might be grown. The Rotation will be 1st Wheat, (2nd) Winter Barley, AB6 Enhanced, Overwintered Stubbes.

I’m very happy to use the Weaving GD on land and in condition where I know it will work, as long as it won’t smear or stick to the discs. That means early!
Hopefully all, if not most of my drilling will be done this way.

As soon conditions look iffy, I’ll switch to the Horsch with the Metcalfe tines.

If and when conditions deteriorate such that neither of the above will work well enough, there will still be time to Plough and immediately Combi-drill what is left.

If Winter Beans are grown, these will be planted with the Horsch using the Metcalfe longer-narrow points.


This is a business, not a ‘cause’ and I simply cannot have a situation like we have ended up with this year.
Though CS and SFI, plus the remaining BPS incomes will cushion the situation.

But I haven’t bottled it!

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alomy75 said:

All well and good if you’ve got no blackgrass

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DaveGrohl said:

Nice to have all that machinery to hand. Just sayin.

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Flintstone said:

I hadn’t cultivated for 9 years until last summer, when I did a light scuff over most stubbles to get more BG to chit. Yes, it got more BG to chit, but overall it was a mistake, and I’ll not cultivate again. The two fields that had zero till for the tenth year in a row look brilliant. The rest of the fields (all had the light scuff) have thinner areas in them, and were much slower to drain when it dried up a few weeks ago.

I went DD in 2015 mainly to make a slicker and more efficient system, and the soil improvements have been something I was told I’d get, but didn’t actually expect to be as marked as they are.

I’ve learned my lesson this year, and won’t cultivate again in case we have another nine months like we’ve just had.

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Two Tone said:

Normal rules can go completely out of the window with regards DD and Blackgrass and there no ‘Black and white’ with it.

DD’d crops will take 2 weeks longer to establish and if you leave it too late, they will not compete against the BG enough.

Also in many cases, BG has quickly adapted to cope with crops being drilled later.

If you can DD with absolute minimum soil disturbance, chances are you won’t wake the BG up.
That might tend to favour a Disc drill over a tine drill.

However, on the whole, it is generally accepted that soils need to get used to and in the right condition after several years of DD with a tine drill, that does still create some tilth, before we can start using a Disc type DD drill.

Therein lays a massive dilemma, insofar that the tine type DD drill could create a BG problem, whereas properly ploughing will bury the BG seed and 70% of will die each year, provided that it is kept 2” below daylight.

That Is why I chose to go straight to a disc type DD drill on this farm, after returning to the plough from the BG explosion I created with min-till.
But, in years like this present one, on anything other than Light/Boy’s land I haven’t got a sensible DD’d crop and ironically, due to the excessive rainfall, the extremely robust pre-ems have washed away and I have a severe BG problem again!

I have a plan as shown in post 26.
Let’s just call that plan A!

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Adeptandy said:

So increased bird numbers and reduced degradation of peat soils are no longer a public good
No longer using insecticides then isn't a public good, as an environmental campaigner I would have thought this would have been a plus for you

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Two Tone said:

Trouble is I don’t!

I have a GD drill, and the use of a Horsch CO3 with Metcalfe tines.
I still have a plough (which belongs to me, not the farm I manage).

But I don’t have a Combi any more and don’t want to buy one unless absolutely necessary.
As my plan in post 26 shows I wouldn’t need one until last resort, I’ll hold off buying one unless and until absolutely necessary.

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delilah said:

None of those public goods are most effectively achieved via a nationwide sub for DD.

The first two would need a long term - minimum 10 year - contract in place in order to achieve public good. From reading the other thread currently running, folks can't even decide - after years of debate - what constitutes DD never mind making a 10 year commitment to it.

The third has its own SFI standard. I suggested to Janet that it should be a retrospective payment - ie you only get the money after you have gone a cropping without applying insecticide - as that would achieve the greater public good. There is no public good in seeing a crop taken out by a pest that can be controlled.

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Adeptandy said:

The first 2 were achieved in the first year, my RSPB neighbors informed me of the bird numbers and the 2nd was obvious once we had a Fen blow, my fields with green cover remained intact, the fields surrounding lost another layer.
I'm sorry, but you don't appear to be interested in anything other than your own predetermined opinions. I only speak of what I'm experiencing on my own little patch and I can see an improvement environmentally. I'm not saying DD is a panacea that will heal the world, but surely anything positive is better than a negative action on the world in which we live. Hence a public good

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DrWazzock said:

There is a point there though. When they go into the over winter covers with heavy discs in May what happens to the skylarks nests. What happens to the bumble bee nests when the pollinator mix is rotated? What does the gas banger do on bird seed mixes? It keeps the rooks off the drilled seed but disrupts nesting birds for a fair distance around. At the minute it’s a points wins prizes simplistic system now being milked by every slick agent in the country but there’s no joined up thinking on quantity , quality, nesting habitat, etc. People don’t even monitor the results. How many more bees or birds are there above the baseline we have now. Nobody even knows what the baseline is so how will they know if the works are value for money or benefit the environment? Just growing a pristine crop of birdseed to be inspected for seed but not birds with no regard to how it’s grown is typical of the dead hand of the civil service / land agent arrangement.
With too many domestic cats, badgers, dog walkers, magpies etc, what’s the point of throwing thousands of tonnes of birdseed at birds in the countryside? Without safe nesting sites, reduction of predators etc it’s a waste of time and will probably only benefit vermin.

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Grass And Grain said:

Plenty of 4m combis available from dealers yards at short notice. Get one that will do the job for about £5k. Suffolk coulters will do if going into ploughed land. Cheap insurance really.

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