Combination cropping

[Steel]

I read on this site a while back about combination cropping. This has got me thinking ad I want to try some.
I have decided this year to try a Wheat Faba Bean combination. I hope the crop competition should keep weeds suppressed.
My main concern is harvest. To thrash the wheat out of the heads I will probably smash up the Faba Beans. I think getting the wheat and beans separated should not be to hard, and even if I do have problems at worst I will end up with some great quality sheep feed.

Has anyone tried this before and got any tips.

 

[SilliamWhale]

Maybe oats and peas would be better for sheep?

 

[Bury the Trash]

I read on this site a while back about combination cropping. This has got me thinking ad I want to try some.
I have decided this year to try a Wheat Faba Bean combination. I hope the crop competition should keep weeds suppressed.
My main concern is harvest. To thrash the wheat out of the heads I will probably smash up the Faba Beans. I think getting the wheat and beans separated should not be to hard, and even if I do have problems at worst I will end up with some great quality sheep feed.

Has anyone tried this before and got any tips.

I drill barley and peas mixed (still not exactly sure of my optimum ratio) . It is then fed to sheep whole and together.
It does seem to do well on low inputs.

 

[Devon James]

Would 60:40 be about right? Thinking of doing some and clamping. May undersow it

 

[Andy Howard]

Organic research centre has done trials on it. Hugh Bulson did research on it if you google him. Or you can wait for my Nuffield report in the late summer! No ideal mix really. Depends on your aims, soil type, proposed inputs if any etc. A general starting point would be 75% seed rate of both.

 

[Bury the Trash]

Would 60:40 be about right? Thinking of doing some and clamping. May undersow it

last year i tried half and half.but there are other variables,= fertilty and the particular growing season i havnt grown enough yet.
I will be trying a few oats with the peas last year did some on the headland last year and the main problem was tall oats ( dont think you can use growth reg.?well i didnt anyway) smothering the peas a bit. so again seed rate is important compromise.Oats/peas would give a good break crop though.
The alround prob. as i see it is just not getting quite enough peas... at the end of the day for protein I req in the mix.

 

[Bury the Trash]

I read on this site a while back about combination cropping. This has got me thinking ad I want to try some.
I have decided this year to try a Wheat Faba Bean combination. I hope the crop competition should keep weeds suppressed.
My main concern is harvest. To thrash the wheat out of the heads I will probably smash up the Faba Beans. I think getting the wheat and beans separated should not be to hard, and even if I do have problems at worst I will end up with some great quality sheep feed.

Has anyone tried this before and got any tips.

Try an area, you will soon find out .
At least the beans will stand to harvest - well better than peas anyway ? particularly if ( from memory) (with regards to drier conditions) much lower seed rates of the whole mix would be used in Oz.

 

[Steel]

It is irrigation and I usually sow beans at 180kg/ha and wheat at 80kg/ha. I think the beans would shade out the Wheat if I used a heavy rate so I am thinking 1/2 bean rate and 3/4 Wheat rate. I am thinking of trying 10 ha.

I have about 100kg of peas left over from a year ago so I might try a couple of hectares of them with Barley as well.

 

[Bury the Trash]

i have sown at a bit over 200kg/ha pea / barley combined and tried 60:40 and 50:50 mix's .no herbicide or fungicide was used (last season) seed was undressed

 

[Steel]

Trial is in.

Planted the Faba Beans at 90 kg/ha and 65 kg/ha to try different rates and the wheat at 80 kg/ha

Only did 4.5 ha, as That was how much Faba Bean seed I had left when I finished my Faba Bean blocks.

I sowed another 4 ha of strait wheat at 120 kg/ha at the same fertilizer rate to compare protein of the wheat with the beans and without beans.

 

[Hartwig]

Does anybody know about the use of herbicides in such a mix and the use of PGR in a mix like that or peas & oats ?? Oats would really need good doses of PGR to have enough strength to hold up the peas.
Sadly the idea about peas & oats came just now to my mind, too late for this year but I see alot of advantages : easy care crop, very low input, good for stripper heading and disc drilling behind, easy to separate if needed after combine, etc.

Any experience would be appreciated for next year.

 

[Old McDonald]

Oats and vetch is an old (possibly ancient) combination. It is still used here in Portugal, but obviously not so much in Britain otherwise others would have posted about it before now.

It is usually made into hay, but can be combined. You then have a good concentrate feed as well as excellent feeding straw. Lupins and oats are another possibility for hay and I have grown them too. This year (cutting as soon as this weekends rain stops - it will be the last until October) I have grown pure lupins for hay.

 

[martian]

Oats and vetch is an old (possibly ancient) combination. It is still used here in Portugal, but obviously not so much in Britain otherwise others would have posted about it before now.
.

Wheat and vetch (or tares) is a pretty ancient mix if St Matthew is to be believed, although in his parable of the tares (Matt13, v24-29, as always the King James Version tells it best) the impression is given that the farmer's enemy came in the night and sowed tares in his lovely wheat crop. His servants wanted to root the tares out, but he sensibly opted to take both crops through to harvest and separate them out afterwards. Then the tares were bundled up and cast into the fire, which seems rather a waste.

 

[Old McDonald]

martian, As always the KJV tells the story best, but it is just a story. I think that tares in those days were not the Vicia sativa that we know as Vetch (or common Vetch if you like) but rather a weed. Rogeuing weeds is a good management tool, although very expensive if you have to pay the labour.

 

[Farmersdaughter]

How d

Trial is in.

Planted the Faba Beans at 90 kg/ha and 65 kg/ha to try different rates and the wheat at 80 kg/ha

Only did 4.5 ha, as That was how much Faba Bean seed I had left when I finished my Faba Bean blocks.

I sowed another 4 ha of strait wheat at 120 kg/ha at the same fertilizer rate to compare protein of the wheat with the beans and without beans.

How did this work out?

 

[Steel]

Worked very well this year as a very wet September wreaked a lot of our wheat and Faba beans and stopped us getting the fungicide on the beans for Chocolate spot as much as we needed.
I think the combination crop went about 4 to 5 t/ha and about 50/50 wheat beans. It looked like the 90kg beans produced more beans than wheat and the 65kg beans had more wheat than beans. The best response was the lack of chocolate spot in the combination crop. Our strait beans was sprayed 4 times and was still wreaked with the yield averaging only 1 t/ha. The combination hardly had any choc spot and was only sprayed once which was probably not necessary at all.
Harvest was also no problem. Slowed the rotor a little and had it a bit more open than the wheat setting. Did not break many beans and the wheat thrashed well as it was not one of the tougher to thrash varieties. I have not tried to separate the seed yet and may not as it is terrific sheep feed.
I plan on doing a bit more next year. This year was a an odd year with a huge amount of rain in September. The beans grew much taller than usual and fell down pulling the wheat down with it. In a usual year the wheat would yield higher, but I am not sure about the beans.
The combination crop bean set was incredible with over 12 nodes with pods on each stem, when the strait beans had between 3 and 6 nodes with beans.

 

[AG Tim]

I have Seen mixtures with vetches some year ago on a organic farm in germany.
The vetches where broadcasted in spring when the wheat was already growing. It was used as proteinsource for their pigfeed diets with a good ballanced aminoacid content. The vetches grow more in the kind of a weed. Iam not sure if the little seedlings emerge like normal arable crops or have a dormancy like weeds, so i thought it could get a serious problem in OSR rotations when it is near imposible to separate the different seeds. The farm there raised organic sunflowers instead of OSR, in order to the problems with insects and fertilizer needs in organic OSR.
They also used Persian Clover as silage Crop drilled in spring and followed with wheat (plowless) where it gets to some kind of living mulch that would be easily killed by frost.

This is there Website
http://www.vorwerkpodemus.de/home.html

For me i wont suite there Idea how farming should be and look like, but for their organic business they really went an impressing way.