Direct Driller Magazine

SHOULD YOU ROTATE YOUR COVER CROPS? FOUR ISSUES TO CONSIDER You probably know that crop rotation is a good thing. Growing different crops back to back provides several benefits, such as preventing pests and disease, improving soil health and reducing fertilizer inputs, all of which can boost your crop yields and your bottom line. By adding cover crops to the mix, you’re diversifying your rotation even more. But have you thought about rotating your cover crops? Should you be using the same cover crop species back to back, year after year? Written by Laura Barrera, published on AgFuse in June 2018 Avoiding clubroot with rotation Dave Robison, who runs the blog PlantCoverCrops.com and is an agronomist for Legacy Seeds, says there...

Groundswell 2019 We started Groundswell out of a sense of frustration that no-one was putting on a Summer Show to which we might want to go. Having gone down the no-till route, we realised that we only really needed a good seed drill and not a barn full of expensive cultivating equipment, so Cereals and all those Tillage events were a waste of our time. None of the lectures and very few of the exhibitors talked about the soil, let alone soil biology. A visit to the fabulous No-Till on the Plains Conference in Salina, Kansas showed us what could be done. One of the most striking things was how hungry for information the farmer delegates were about the soil and the ecosystems that lived in them. Also, a lot of the speakers were...

Hitting the Sainfoin Trail As based on information found on Agricology (www.agricology.co.uk) Richard Smith, farm manager of Daylesford Organic in Gloucestershire, is a regular contributor to a series of video blogs produced by Agricology. One topic that he favours for the organic system is growing sainfoin as a forage crop. In this article he reveals some of his experiences of growing and managing sainfoin on the farm: At Daylesford, we’ve grown a variety of crops over the years but the one that has consistently come out on top is sainfoin, due to it being a highly nutritious (palatable silage) hay crop or grazing crop for livestock. It was grown widely throughout the Cotswolds a hundred years ago; mainly to feed the heavy horses...

Featured Farmer David Miller Wheatsheaf Farming Company (WFC) farms around 700 Hectares of grade 3 land in Hampshire for 3 landowners. 2 of the landowners also own WFC as a method of farming their land more cost effectively. David Miller, their farm manager, describes details of their move from conventional to no-till farming. I have worked in farming full time since 1975 and have progressed through the farming fashions that have presented themselves through the next 35 years. As such this branded me as a “conventional” farmer. We moved from a low input, low output system to the new-fangled German Schleswig-Holstein method of wheat production. This involved increased nitrogen applications matched by increased fungicide...

Not wishing to blow smoke up any arses , issue 5 is the best yet , proper old school magazine , keep it up guys ,

Conserving Water with Cover Crops Large parts of Germany have struggled for years with very erratic rainfall patterns. Some farmers are now tending to question the usefulness of cover cropping in dry and even semiarid regions largely on the basis of their experience in the dry summer and autumn of 2015. Does cover cropping conserve water or squander it? Written by Markus Scheller ∙ Dettelbach-Euerfeld The benefits of cover crops are undisputed: They help to increase biological activity in the soil and improve the soil structure. Cover crops also prevent soil erosion caused by wind or heavy rainfall and reduce nutrient leaching. Some species even have the ability to unlock nutrients bound in the soil, making them available to the...

We will be adding all of Issue 5 to The Farming Forum - here is what to expect... CONTENTS ISSUE 5 Introduction .....................................................4 Conserving Water with Cover Crops ................................6 Featured Farmer: David Miller......................................8 Hitting the Sainfoin Trail..........................................10 Groundswell 2019...............................................12 Should you rotate your Cover Crops ...............................16 Making a smooth change to No-till ................................20 FarmInn from Rothamsted........................................22 Spring into action: Choosing Adjuvants ............................24 Farmer Focus: David...

Based on Interview with Dr John Baker, CrossSlot New Zealand. Medicine has made quantum leaps in research, treatment and surgical procedures in recent years – now it’s time for arable farming to follow suit. Where medicine has moved from invasive to keyhole surgery, agriculture has gone from keyhole to invasive farming, resulting in the depletion of quality soil and contributing to global warming. International soil scientist, John Baker, says medical science, since last century, has learned to operate on people without disturbing anything more than the immediate part of the body being replaced or repaired. That meant the body wasn’t violated unnecessarily as surgeons identified the problem area. “This quantum leap resulted in...

By Nathan Morris, Elizabeth Stockdale, David Clarke - NIAB Long term findings from field-scale experiments (STAR and NFS) show that while yields with non-inversion tillage are similar in most years to yields with ploughing, when decreased costs of labour and fuel are factored in, gross margins under non-inversion tillage were better than under ploughed systems. Hence non-inversion tillage is advocated under ‘normal’ conditions. The influence of primary cultivation method on crop yields will no doubt continue to cause debate, but long-term findings from the STAR (Sustainability Trial for Arable Rotations) and NFS (New Farming Systems) projects are giving some hard evidence of impacts across seasons and soil types. The long running...

AHDB’s Petworth Monitor Farm group reignited two popular debates at their recent meeting (18 October 2018): discs versus tines and ‘to till or not to till’. The Monitor Farm group is hosted by Mark Chandler at Moor Farm in West Sussex. Mark and the other farmers in the group wanted to see how different levels of cultivation and types of drilling affected his first wheat crop, following beans. In a normal year, Mark would cultivate behind the combine with a Simba SL600 cultivator running LD legs and points. He would usually use an LD subsoiler and carrier disks on compacted areas or tramlines, before drilling with a Horsch Sprinter Drill or Amazone Cayena lowdisturbance tined coulter drill. Paul Hill, AHDB Knowledge Exchange Manager...

By David White A predicted slowish drive down the M11/25/20 turned out as predicted. Richard Harding my observer and I had left in plenty of time to catch our EuroTunnel train so a coffee and croissant in the terminal building we slipped under the channel on route Dieppe. Day one had been reserved for travelling down but rather than fill it with a long lunch stop at Le Touquet I had researched the resting places of some family members killed in the Great War so I could pay my respects. Blue sky and 17 degree temperatures made for a very pleasant drive across to Auby our first cemetery destination. November 1st was All Saints Day in France which meant the town cemetery was still brightly decorated with Chrysanthemums. After somewhat...

By Richard Harding Organic’s potential for whole farm improvements came under focus at the UK’s largest organic on-farm event. The 2018 National Organic Combinable Crops (NOCC) conference brought organic and non-organic growers together to hear the benefits organic systems bring to the farm business and the farmed environment. It is noticeable again this year the increasing number of farmers and agronomists practicing Conservation Agriculture who have become regular attendees. Held by Organic Farmers & Growers at Green Acres Farm in Shifnal near Telford, Shropshire. The day took place on another extremely hot July day, NOCC featured experts from across the production and supply chain. The day began with first speaker NIAB’s head of...

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS CALCIUM’S VITAL ROLE IN SOIL NUTRITION 10th October 2018 – At Nantwich Football Club Calcium has a key role in maintaining healthy, fertile soils and the production of high-quality crops and forages. Yet it is estimated that 60% of UK soils are below optimal levels of pH and calcium, and the importance of this key nutrient is often overlooked. To help put calcium under the spotlight, granulated lime manufacturer, Calcifert, hosted the UK’s first Calcium Conference back in October. The event attracted an audience of more than 100 agronomists, arable producers, soil specialists and livestock farmers; highlighting the wide range of applications that calcium has within the agricultural sector. Whilst the day’s...

Mike Donovan writes... Joel Williams is a familiar face to many with an interest in soil health and biology, and first spoke to a UK farming audience in 2010. The Australian plant and soil health educator has a global audience and Direct Driller magazine caught him at the Overbury Estate in Worcestershire where he joined the estate manager and no-till enthusiast Jake Freestone and also Simon Cowell, a long term no-tiller who farms heavy land in Essex who was voted Soil Farmer of the Year 2018. The day provided a mass of information both in the field and from the podium for farmers thinking of transitioning to no-till as well as others who have already made the change. The event was superbly organised by QLF, quality liquid feeds, who...

After successfully completing the multi-year research project MARS (Mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms) in collaboration with the Ulm University of Applied Sciences and the EU research funding, AGCO and Fendt decided to develop the robot project up to series-production readiness for the Fendt brand. The entire system, including small robots operating in swarms and a cloud-based system control will now be operated under the product name ‘XAVER’. ‘Xaver’ is a traditional Bavarian name with deep roots at Fendt. In the 1930s, the brothers Hermann and Xaver Fendt founded ‘Maschinen- und Schlepperfabrik Xaver Fendt & Co.’, named after their grandfather Xaver Fendt. Regarding the new robots the name ‘Xaver’ incorporates tradition and the...

LAMMA 2019 will see the launch of a new low disturbance Soil Conditioner developed by the team at Dale Drills. As a non-drilling piece of equipment, the Dale’s decided to launch the product under a new brand, Meir Agricultural, named after owners Tom and James Dale’s late maternal Grandfather, Thomas Meir, who worked as an engineer in Teeside in his youth, before taking on the challenge of farming on the plains of Manitoba, Canada in his later years. The Meir SC has been designed to complement reduced tillage strategies, such as those employed on the Dale’s own farm. ‘Much of the soil we farm is not naturally self-structuring,’ explains Tom Dale. ‘Consequently, it is often a requirement to assist nature to provide optimum drainage...

GPS and other modern technologies, along with thorough trial protocols, can make farm trialling straightforward and routine. Decisions and innovations can then become thoroughly validated and tailored to real farming conditions. This useful guide from ADAS outlines processes leading to successful farm-trialling and how to avoid the pitfalls. The guide covers trials conducted with ADAS Agronōmics support, trials using yield mapping technology without ADAS support, and trials where the yields are assessed by weighbridge. Terms and Conditions that are worth knowing Bout: Land area covered by one unidirectional pass of a machine, usually from one end of the field to the other: e.g. drill bout, spray bout, spreader bout, or harvester...

COMPARISON OF “STANDARD ROW” TO “WIDE ROW“ IN ORGANIC SPRING WHEAT AND SOYBEANS By Einböck, from their Organic Farming Guidebook In spring of 2017, organic spring wheat and soybeans were sown in plots (4000 m² each). Each crop was seeded once in standard row (row spacing 13 cm / 5”) and on wide row (row spacing 37.5 cm / 15”). Location The test area is located at 4751 Dorf an der Pram (Austria), at an altitude of 460m above sea level. The average annual temperature is 11 degrees Celsius and the average annual rainfall is 900 litres/m² (distributed over 80 days of rain). The soil type is silty loam. Seeding At spring wheat, the sowing rate was reduced by 28 % compared to standard row. (345 grains/m² instead of 480 grains/m²)...

HOW NZ CONTRACTORS NO-TILL 3000HA/YEAR WITH A 3M SEEDER By Thierry Stokkermans There is one country where some contractors seed 3000 hectares per year with a 3 metre wide drill, and it is New Zealand. It is not a country of wide plains… most paddocks have odd shapes. How do they do this? New Zealand has a mild oceanic climate and numerous mountains. Their climate allows the grass to grow all year long. They stock sheep and cattle, for the meat and the milk. There is some cash cropping but arable farms are uncommon, most farms are all grass or mixed. In this pedo-climatic environment and with this farming industry, it is possible to establish new crops 10 months a year. The limitation is a winter break of about 2 months. The NZ...

BUSY BACKEND AND DISCUSSIONS WITH THE NEIGH SAYERS! Having travelled all over the country with the Ma/Ag drill we are now beginning to see the results of our toils which seem positive. As always during demonstration, we have visits from the next door neighbour, some with positives comments and some not quite so. On one demonstration which I and the farmer where more than happy with, the visiting cousin was negative to say the least. After his departure, I spoke to the farmer about his cousin’s opinion, and had the response that he was very positive until I stepped out of the cab! I have grown a little tired of the comments that direct drills are only a dry weather tool, we have proved that providing you can travel without making a...