Direct/Strip-till drilling photo gallery

Green oak

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Essex
Certainly looks better than our spring oats which are being hollowed by the slugs. :mad: Can't remember the seed rate off the top of my head for that field, but it would have been about 220-230kg/ha drilled on 11 Oct.

We keep upping the rates every year and I've never had a field that I've thought I'd put the rate up too high yet except in OSR.
I go 250kgs/hec now. On everything first and second wheat. Late October /Nov drilling. Wheat does look better over the last few days I must admit.
 

E_B

Member
Location
Norfolk
I'm very interested in your early drilling experiment. Crop doesn't look too forward considering. How bad was the black-grass before your hot post-em and is the field generally a bad black-grass field?

That field was not too bad for BG the year before. It was winter beans that did have a fair bit of BG come through but was killed off well in-crop. The crop prior to that was rather dirty, it was strip tilled wheat after ploughed oats, also dirty no doubt.

We have another field of wheat drilled the day before that had bad BG last year (ploughed oats), and that indeed does have bad BG in places this year. It received avadex, no other pre-em due to the weather. It has a hot post-em (burnt off overlaps) plus Autumn Atlantis. Most people would probably spray off a few patches on that field, but we want the straw. Going in with beans next.

I'm not pretending it's a trial worth much, but a set of circumstances that are interesting. So if there is any half-baked conclusion to be drawn from those, it's that the cleanish fields the year before remained clean even after early drilling, and the dirty fields from the year before remained dirty even after early drilling. I think that you should experiment with a couple of clean fields this year with early drilling, especially if going in with the 750A. I appreciate the BYDV concerns. The wheat is visibly no further forward that that which was drilled over a month later.

Your crops look fantastic.
 

E_B

Member
Location
Norfolk
Is that a typo, or is that a common seed rate when DDing at that time of year.

Not a typo. Crops on that land tend not to tiller particularly well in Spring and over the years we have always though that the crops could be thicker, so we are bumping up the seed rate until we feel like we're making the most of it. Seed being the cheapest input. I'll take a photo next time I'm there and see how it's looking now.
 

E_B

Member
Location
Norfolk
Done about 13 ha of strip tilled maize into a 'cover' of wheat volunteers and weeds after a laid crop last harvest the last day or so. In general I wish we had sprayed off in winter but things like that get forgotten about being a dairy farm, plus I don't really know if we had the opportunity before it turned wet anyway.

On the bits with clay, the cover had binded the soil together causing the front leg to slice through rather than burst and create tilth. Then the coulter didn't have much to work with and skated out on top, not placing the seed particularly well in places. But then in the same run, another strip might be fine, it simply depended on how much root mass there was in that spot.

Conversely, perhaps if it had been left bare, then the more awkward spots wouldn't have dried sufficiently. I hear people cultivating are still finding the soil to be too wet at depth. The soil is definitely cooler under the 'cover'. Sprayed off five days before drilling.

Anyway, I think most of this will be okay with a bit of luck, especially with a good soaking this weekend, just about 5 acres of iffy bits. I hope so anyway, to save the jokes of the harvesting crew. We have about 85 acres going in behind the plough so if this fails it won't be a gigantic failure, although an expensive one given the price of maize seed.

DAP down the front leg. Clearance through the drill was no problem.

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