Featured Farmer - Steve Lear
Taking a leap of faith into Direct Drilling
My name is Steve Lear and my family and I run 1000 ha of farmland in Buckinghamshire. We run a mixed farm of beef and arable. We have a suckler herd of 400 pedigree Limousin which are either sold as breeding stock or fattened on the farm. So, with 1000 head of cattle on the farm we have a lot of farm yard manure to spread come the summer. On our arable side we grow milling wheats, hybrid barleys and spring oats in a three-year rotation. Previously we have grown OSR and spring beans but find that the beans don’t really pay very well and the flea beetle pressure in the area is too high to carry on with OSR. Our soils are a mix of clay loams, silty clay loams and heavy clay. Being a mixed farm, we have the benefit of being able to rotate grass around in our rotation which helps to control our blackgrass to a degree.
The first time I saw a direct drill was at an agricultural show a number of years back. I remember turning to my dad and brother and having a laugh about how it would never catch on over here…. And now here I am, eagerly awaiting the delivery of our farms first no-till drill. In this section I am hoping to document our journey into direct drilling as it happens. Ill give you an honest opinion of the pitfalls and successes that we find along the way.
I look forward to your feedback and discussion on The Farming Forum – www.thefarmingforum.co.uk So how was I converted from a sceptic to someone who finds themselves writing in Direct Driller Magazine? For a number of years, I felt that our clay soils were becoming harder and harder to knock down to a seed bed. We had been using a Simba Solo or plough as our primary cultivation followed by either power harrows or discs to knock the soil down before our Vaderstad Rapid drill.
The fuel bill wasn’t getting any smaller and the cost of wearing metal was creeping in the wrong direction. The system always produced a decent crop and was fairly resilient but I always felt that were doing battle with mother nature. It was at this point that I started to see a bit more in the farming press about direct drills. I started to take more interest in the subject and soon I was hooked.
I attended a couple of seminars set up by our agronomists Pro-Cam and listened to the likes of Clive Bailye, Joel Williams and Jamie Stotzka talk on the subject of direct drilling and how our soils work with the plants we are growing. We could see the benefits of No-till and when the implications of Brexit started to unfold it became obvious that we would have to become lower cost producers to compete on the global grain markets.
As farmers we don’t have a huge amount of influence on the variable cost that go into producing a crop, although I think that this is starting to change now. I could see that our fixed costs could be dramatically reduced. We began trying out a few drills in the autumn of 2017 as a bit of a trial. The conditions were not great for direct drilling. The soils were very wet and the crop was being drilled at the beginning of November. But it was a good way of testing them under harsh conditions.
At the time I thought that there wasn’t a cat’s chance in hell of getting a crop off the field. Some drills hadn’t closed the slot properly, some had disturbed to much soil and some hadn’t been able to penetrate the soil. The crop looked very poor coming out of a very wet winter and I thought that I would be ripping it out and putting a spring crop on the field. However, the wheat seemed to come good and the low plant population soon tillered out to fill the gaps. Although it won’t be a record yield for us it certainly won’t be written off.
It was obvious from the trial that we carried out, that we would not just be purchasing a drill and that our whole system would have to change. For a start with direct drilling there is no scope to take out compaction, so the idea is to not cause it in the first place. This isn’t going to be easy on a mixed farm as we have a lot of FYM to get out in the summer. We will be controlling traffic as much as we can without spending huge amounts on GPS systems, put simply we will be driving on tram lines were ever practically possible. It will also mean that we will have to be more patient when the ground is wet.
As well as compaction, we noted that coulter travel was going to be important to us, with no field levelling possible the coulter would have to drop into any wheeling whilst maintaining seed depth. The strip till style drills were able to establish a crop well but there was too much soil movement and this was going to be an issue with our blackgrass. We decided that the Primewest Drill was going to be the best drill for our farm. It has a large coulter pressure which may be needed if our heavy clay dries out at the end of summer. It also has a variable down pressure system integrated into the drill which will help with maintaining seed depth on the fields with more variable soil types.
We are having the drill built with a liquid fertilizer kit on it to enable us to put fertilizer down at drilling when needed. The other reason that we liked the Primewest Drill was the Crosslot technology that they use on the opener. The seed is placed to the side of the disc, which means the slot does not need closing up like other drills. It should also eliminate hair pinning from crop residue. It then came to finding the capital to pay for the drill. I have spoken to some farmers who have sold all their cultivation kit and old drills to finance the purchase of a no-till drill.
We are not dong that just yet as we want to prove it can work before ditching the plough.We applied for a Leader Grant through our local Leader Programme. The process was fairly straightforward and the local Leader team were very helpful and supportive of our application. Our local leader team could see the environmental benefits as well as the economical benefits from direct drilling. In early 2018 we were told that our grant application was successful and we have now gone ahead and ordered our drill. Our drill will be arriving on farm just in time to plant some cover crops in the summer, in the meantime Primewest have drilled 100ha of spring oats for us.
They have also established 15ha of linseed and 22Ha of forage maize. After a wet winter we had to be a bit patient before we could let Primewest travel on the ground. The oats all went in well and they were up and out of the ground very fast. I can see a few crops in the area already struggling with a lack of moisture. Since we haven’t disturbed the ground our crop will be fairly resilient to the long periods of dry. I don’t think that direct drilling is going to be easy on our heavy clay soils, and I’m reminded of this on a weekly basis by friends and neighbours who assure me that it won’t work.
This is great at making me more determined to get it right. Our first task is to get our soils restructuring. We will be drilling a broad species cover crop between winter barley and spring oats. We will be spraying this off in November to allow the ground to dry out ahead of spring drilling. On top of this we will also be using our FYM on all our arable land to help feed the soil. I am hoping that our populations of beneficial organisms will increase rapidly with all the organic matter that we will be putting back into the soil. Looking to the future I hope that we will no longer need our cultivation equipment.
I hope to one day not have any need for insecticides and that our reliance on inorganic fertilizers will be reduced. It’s an exciting time to be in agriculture and we have a lot more to learn about how the plants that we grow are interacting with the soils and the beneficial organisms within it. For too long agriculture has been perceived by the public to be the destroyer of ecosystems and the polluters of rivers. I hope that conservation agricultural practices can go some way to change that perception.
You can read the Article online which is on Page 14 Of Direct Driller Magazine here: https://issuu.com/directdriller/docs/direct_driller_issue_2/14
Taking a leap of faith into Direct Drilling
My name is Steve Lear and my family and I run 1000 ha of farmland in Buckinghamshire. We run a mixed farm of beef and arable. We have a suckler herd of 400 pedigree Limousin which are either sold as breeding stock or fattened on the farm. So, with 1000 head of cattle on the farm we have a lot of farm yard manure to spread come the summer. On our arable side we grow milling wheats, hybrid barleys and spring oats in a three-year rotation. Previously we have grown OSR and spring beans but find that the beans don’t really pay very well and the flea beetle pressure in the area is too high to carry on with OSR. Our soils are a mix of clay loams, silty clay loams and heavy clay. Being a mixed farm, we have the benefit of being able to rotate grass around in our rotation which helps to control our blackgrass to a degree.
The first time I saw a direct drill was at an agricultural show a number of years back. I remember turning to my dad and brother and having a laugh about how it would never catch on over here…. And now here I am, eagerly awaiting the delivery of our farms first no-till drill. In this section I am hoping to document our journey into direct drilling as it happens. Ill give you an honest opinion of the pitfalls and successes that we find along the way.
I look forward to your feedback and discussion on The Farming Forum – www.thefarmingforum.co.uk So how was I converted from a sceptic to someone who finds themselves writing in Direct Driller Magazine? For a number of years, I felt that our clay soils were becoming harder and harder to knock down to a seed bed. We had been using a Simba Solo or plough as our primary cultivation followed by either power harrows or discs to knock the soil down before our Vaderstad Rapid drill.
The fuel bill wasn’t getting any smaller and the cost of wearing metal was creeping in the wrong direction. The system always produced a decent crop and was fairly resilient but I always felt that were doing battle with mother nature. It was at this point that I started to see a bit more in the farming press about direct drills. I started to take more interest in the subject and soon I was hooked.
I attended a couple of seminars set up by our agronomists Pro-Cam and listened to the likes of Clive Bailye, Joel Williams and Jamie Stotzka talk on the subject of direct drilling and how our soils work with the plants we are growing. We could see the benefits of No-till and when the implications of Brexit started to unfold it became obvious that we would have to become lower cost producers to compete on the global grain markets.
As farmers we don’t have a huge amount of influence on the variable cost that go into producing a crop, although I think that this is starting to change now. I could see that our fixed costs could be dramatically reduced. We began trying out a few drills in the autumn of 2017 as a bit of a trial. The conditions were not great for direct drilling. The soils were very wet and the crop was being drilled at the beginning of November. But it was a good way of testing them under harsh conditions.
At the time I thought that there wasn’t a cat’s chance in hell of getting a crop off the field. Some drills hadn’t closed the slot properly, some had disturbed to much soil and some hadn’t been able to penetrate the soil. The crop looked very poor coming out of a very wet winter and I thought that I would be ripping it out and putting a spring crop on the field. However, the wheat seemed to come good and the low plant population soon tillered out to fill the gaps. Although it won’t be a record yield for us it certainly won’t be written off.
It was obvious from the trial that we carried out, that we would not just be purchasing a drill and that our whole system would have to change. For a start with direct drilling there is no scope to take out compaction, so the idea is to not cause it in the first place. This isn’t going to be easy on a mixed farm as we have a lot of FYM to get out in the summer. We will be controlling traffic as much as we can without spending huge amounts on GPS systems, put simply we will be driving on tram lines were ever practically possible. It will also mean that we will have to be more patient when the ground is wet.
As well as compaction, we noted that coulter travel was going to be important to us, with no field levelling possible the coulter would have to drop into any wheeling whilst maintaining seed depth. The strip till style drills were able to establish a crop well but there was too much soil movement and this was going to be an issue with our blackgrass. We decided that the Primewest Drill was going to be the best drill for our farm. It has a large coulter pressure which may be needed if our heavy clay dries out at the end of summer. It also has a variable down pressure system integrated into the drill which will help with maintaining seed depth on the fields with more variable soil types.
We are having the drill built with a liquid fertilizer kit on it to enable us to put fertilizer down at drilling when needed. The other reason that we liked the Primewest Drill was the Crosslot technology that they use on the opener. The seed is placed to the side of the disc, which means the slot does not need closing up like other drills. It should also eliminate hair pinning from crop residue. It then came to finding the capital to pay for the drill. I have spoken to some farmers who have sold all their cultivation kit and old drills to finance the purchase of a no-till drill.
We are not dong that just yet as we want to prove it can work before ditching the plough.We applied for a Leader Grant through our local Leader Programme. The process was fairly straightforward and the local Leader team were very helpful and supportive of our application. Our local leader team could see the environmental benefits as well as the economical benefits from direct drilling. In early 2018 we were told that our grant application was successful and we have now gone ahead and ordered our drill. Our drill will be arriving on farm just in time to plant some cover crops in the summer, in the meantime Primewest have drilled 100ha of spring oats for us.
They have also established 15ha of linseed and 22Ha of forage maize. After a wet winter we had to be a bit patient before we could let Primewest travel on the ground. The oats all went in well and they were up and out of the ground very fast. I can see a few crops in the area already struggling with a lack of moisture. Since we haven’t disturbed the ground our crop will be fairly resilient to the long periods of dry. I don’t think that direct drilling is going to be easy on our heavy clay soils, and I’m reminded of this on a weekly basis by friends and neighbours who assure me that it won’t work.
This is great at making me more determined to get it right. Our first task is to get our soils restructuring. We will be drilling a broad species cover crop between winter barley and spring oats. We will be spraying this off in November to allow the ground to dry out ahead of spring drilling. On top of this we will also be using our FYM on all our arable land to help feed the soil. I am hoping that our populations of beneficial organisms will increase rapidly with all the organic matter that we will be putting back into the soil. Looking to the future I hope that we will no longer need our cultivation equipment.
I hope to one day not have any need for insecticides and that our reliance on inorganic fertilizers will be reduced. It’s an exciting time to be in agriculture and we have a lot more to learn about how the plants that we grow are interacting with the soils and the beneficial organisms within it. For too long agriculture has been perceived by the public to be the destroyer of ecosystems and the polluters of rivers. I hope that conservation agricultural practices can go some way to change that perception.
You can read the Article online which is on Page 14 Of Direct Driller Magazine here: https://issuu.com/directdriller/docs/direct_driller_issue_2/14