I’m interested in trying some dd, how do the headlands work out. I know there are less passes but still a fair bit of turning if running a 3/4m drill and combine, rolling etc
Does Direct Drilling actually save money
- Thread starter Fred
- Start date
Fine with strip tillage. Despite a heavy 6m mounted drill & 370hp on the front, IF tyres and low pressures make it tread lightly. If anything, the emergence is better as the double rolling helps seed to soil contact. Once your soil is self repairing you can hardly see the tramlines anyway.
We are in the same boat, I would add that since we started strip drilling nasty headlands that were hard to get a decent crop of are now coming just as good as the middle.
Ever since going DD all the headlands are often better than the middle of the field.
In the past it was definitely the other way round.
I really struggled with the concept that the crops would be OK on the headlands. But they definitely are.
Run on ground once is fine, run on it repeatedly and you compact it.
SilliamWhale
Member
If hypothetically (but not particularly hypothetically because its totally possible) someone said you could drill 1000 acres a year - 25% rape, 50% winter cereals 25% spring sown with a 3m drill and a 130hp tractor in 300 hours a year with a total investment of £30-60 grand and probably running costs of £2 acre less fuel and the odd unforeseen tractor breakdown would you take it?
It is totally possible.
So then you need to work backwards from this principal -
What is the most difficult problem? (straw, slugs, blackgrass)
Should I and can I use some cheap tillage to get me out of trouble? (answer: yes esp in the early years)
Are lower yields acceptable for no till? Not really, you should be able to get the same yields generally give or take a few mistakes. But I can't even get higher yields year on year necessarily so I can't necessarily say yields will always rise
It is totally possible.
So then you need to work backwards from this principal -
What is the most difficult problem? (straw, slugs, blackgrass)
Should I and can I use some cheap tillage to get me out of trouble? (answer: yes esp in the early years)
Are lower yields acceptable for no till? Not really, you should be able to get the same yields generally give or take a few mistakes. But I can't even get higher yields year on year necessarily so I can't necessarily say yields will always rise
I am 100% in favor of no till but in all my 1000s hrs of research i have yet to hear of 1 reliable way of doing it without roundup, everybody wants to ignore the elephant in the room, roundup has no future in farming so can someone tell me how to do this without it please? Flame throwers , robots, crimping etc are all b s in my opinion
We still have elective herbicides. When roundup goes it won't be no till that's in the biggest mess.. dirtiest farms I see tend to use ploughs or these ripper machines.
Sprayer 1
Member
- Location
- Tarporley, Cheshire.
To any of you that don't have their basis, do you think there is a place for specialists DD agronomists? As I am one of very few dd ing in my area I find that agronomists are not very clued up on the system ,especially the nutritional side. Is this the same all over or do you bigger growers all have your basis?
ollie989898
Member
DD works, it does not fail for some mysterious reason that the seed realised it was put in the ground without a cultivator having passed there first.
You have to recalibrate your understanding of what a seed bed should look like. I am sold on the claydon system, it just needs a roller or similar to level the ground out a bit afterwards and if it is dry germination can be a bit sporadic, but behind maize, with no slug pressure, it is a no brainer.
There will be a replacement product for roundup, finding a total herbicide is a lot easier than one that is selective.
Down here I would bale everything and then the straw issue is minimised.
You have to recalibrate your understanding of what a seed bed should look like. I am sold on the claydon system, it just needs a roller or similar to level the ground out a bit afterwards and if it is dry germination can be a bit sporadic, but behind maize, with no slug pressure, it is a no brainer.
There will be a replacement product for roundup, finding a total herbicide is a lot easier than one that is selective.
Down here I would bale everything and then the straw issue is minimised.
I'm doing the BETA course in January. It is mentioned in the syllabus here http://www.basis-reg.co.uk/Portals/1/Courses/Syllabus/SYLL_BETA_CONS_MGMT.pdf
Selective herbicides are not the answer, a replacement for roundup is not the answer, farming with toxic chemicals is not the future
Go organic instead then. Just don't use any copper sulphate fungicide!
Necessity is the mother of all invention. The demand for a non selective herbicide is such that I'm sure we'd see an alternative brought to market in a few years if it gets past CRD. I'm sure Bayer Monsanto already have a few up their sleeve that weren't commercially viable with glyphosate at sub £2/litre. We've lost paraquat, diquat, glufosinate-ammonium due to toxicity issues or market uncompetitiveness.
ollie989898
Member
There must be dozens of alternatives, only with glyphosate that cheap, as you say, they can't be brought to market yet.
I visited 2 organic farms in Europe recently and they are using at least 5 tillage passes to control plants that they don't want, that has no future either. We are going to have to return to the farming model of what worked for 1000s of years, mostly perennial crops, properly managed animals grazing the land with the very rare use of the plough for crop destruction. Only time will prove that to be true
SilliamWhale
Member
We are going to be forced to with this one, how many people are sick, dying or already dead way before their time? We are poisoning ourselves eating a diet of processed chemical laden sh!t that we call food, this world survived for ? years producing food without a toxic soup of chemicals. Bayer and their kind have done a great job convincing us all that we can't farm without their poison, they are responsible for the suffering and death of more people the all the despots in history
Every time one of the cans or bags we've used since the Chemical Age started is put under threat! My boss wanted to add some yellow rattle to a meadow so we spent a while talking about the best way until I asked a friend who said "feed some seed with a bit of rolled grain to the cattle grazing it and it will be spread that way." What will they think of next? Mixed farming with fertility building leys in the rotation? Mob grazing as practiced by thousands of migratory bovines in Africa for millenia?
Very noble. How will you make a living off the land in the meantime? No one is paying a premium for "healthier" grain. It looks just the same as the mass produced stuff everyone else is producing & is only worth as much. The only way you can add value to a commodity is to stop it being that commodity and process it yourself, using provenance as a point of difference.
Nah that won't work around here, not on my soil type, not in my climate.Every time one of the cans or bags we've used since the Chemical Age started is put under threat! My boss wanted to add some yellow rattle to a meadow so we spent a while talking about the best way until I asked a friend who said "feed some seed with a bit of rolled grain to the cattle grazing it and it will be spread that way." What will they think of next? Mixed farming with fertility building leys in the rotation? Mob grazing as practiced by thousands of migratory bovines in Africa for millenia?