How many farms are using voluntary / unpaid fallow in their rotation?

Rent, HP, insurance, etc are all fixed and sunk costs in year 1. They are to pay cropped or not. It is not true to say that a crop of beans making no profit is the same as a field of fallow making no profit. If the beans make no profit then at least I have paid my machinery and my wage.

Lets say beans at £150ac rent break even.
Beans at £80ac rent pay £70
Fallow at £150ac looses £60
Fallow at £80ac pays £10 (this year)

If my rent is £80 then I can fallow for a small profit. If my rent is £150 then I grow the beans as even if I make no cash profit then I accrue some of the cost of growing by paying off HP or attributing some of the land work to my labour.

The beans fix a tenner per acre nitrogen. The fallow certainly allows you to (for OSR) cut out the graminicide and probably half your seed rate. For wheat, depends on how good your beans weed control is.

Some people, when growing beans, might take the "fixed" nitrogen into account for working out the margin of their beans. I do this with any fallow but it's still a fairly drastic step to take.

I agree, when fixed costs already set up to farm 100% of the existing area, that not growing a crop is going to be much less profitable unless you can suddenly shrink your fixed costs (excluding rent).

What I am talking about is adding an extra amount of land where you have the free choice of whether to increase your machinery, labour etc. In that instance, even if you were paying a rent, the choice between beans or fallow should come down to which is more profitable (before the rent is deducted). That is, unless you can somehow use existing machinery to farm the land with no effect upon the existing acreage; a common lure for many farmers which often doesn't happen quite as neatly as that.
 

franklin

New Member
Yes. If I were taking on more land and was unable or unwilling to kit up to do it, then I would make the choice to get a contractor in to get the crop in, or fallow it almost entirely based on the level of blackgrass. I have no quarms whatsoever about ringing up and getting someone in to plough some ground for me to improve timeliness etc. In general, I am over-kitted to take on a bit more anyway, but taking on more land and boshing in a crop, especially late on heavy dirt is seldom better than putting some mustard on with the quad bike; checking the outfalls; sorting the ditches; doing some moling, and gearing up for next year.

Under *no* circumstances would I ever leave soil like mine with nothing growing on it again. Tenner of mustard seed at the very least money well spent if you can spin it on while spraying off the BG.
 
@Feldspar was Just thinking about this (but slightly differently) when walking dog this morning.

Could we grass down a lot of our headlands and use them as our silage ground. Would make fields much more efficient for cropping as we could turn on grass but would make grazing difficult. We currently use fallow grass margins for our efa but different rules up here.

Have a similar sort of situation in one field. It's a pretty heavy field with a bit of compaction on the headland. Had brome there last year in winter barley which I wanted to spray off before ploughing or deep cultivating the headland. Lightly cultivated middle of the field, but due to the wet and being a bit slow did not plough the headland. Field is due to go into spring oats, but I cannot see that it is now worth trying to plant spring oats in the headland. Might leave it fallow and then have time to cultivated it in good conditions in the later spring and maybe even plant some green manure to tide it over until next year. Trying to ram spring oats into a sloppy wet mess is probably not worth the effort.
 

franklin

New Member
Have a similar sort of situation in one field. It's a pretty heavy field with a bit of compaction on the headland. Had brome there last year in winter barley which I wanted to spray off before ploughing or deep cultivating the headland. Lightly cultivated middle of the field, but due to the wet and being a bit slow did not plough the headland. Field is due to go into spring oats, but I cannot see that it is now worth trying to plant spring oats in the headland. Might leave it fallow and then have time to cultivated it in good conditions in the later spring and maybe even plant some green manure to tide it over until next year. Trying to ram spring oats into a sloppy wet mess is probably not worth the effort.

Possibly the best crop to drill into some potentially sloppy fallow would be spring oats. At worst they are a good green manure.
 

colhonk

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Darlington
Will we be able to count the 2 metre strips of weeds and rubbish alongside our hedges from this year,seem to remember reading something about fallow alonside heges?
 
bare land fallow or low output cover will gradually lead to a rundown of the soil especially on heavier soil as the ground will get wet and sad unless you put a lot of steel and diesel into it
if you get a wet summer the following winter will result in wetter soil compared to a crop or high output cover

a later planted spring crop will leave the soil in better condition and not cost much to establish the low cost of notill would also leave a margin

efa can be satisfied with hedgerows or buffer strips next to hedge or ditch

look at the bigger picture there is now more and more evidence that covercrops and regular cropping give higher margins than bareland fallow of overwintered stubble
 

fudge

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire.
Invariably when I fallow a field it is a replacement for second cereals. On some areas ww/our/ww/beans/ww/fallow is more profitable than ww/ww/osr/ww/ww/beans. Of course this is dependent on forward pricing, but our first wheats always come off best and I don't want to grow rape every other year. Pulses need to be 5 years apart imo.
 
We have never been afraid to use fallow in the past if it fits in ,,,,, use it to get problems sorted and what ever else , I just look upon it as another weapon in my fight against BG and is possibly one of the reasons why my BG is still controllable at the moment ,,,,, it also helps that I don't have silly rents to find ,,,,, if I ever needed to really simplify my system or find a way of farming on a reduced man power then I might consider going back to 20 % fallow , it would follow wheat , I could leave bales in the fields and take them off at a later date ,,,, spread some of my FYM and then start getting it ready for the following crop which would probably be rape , even loading my remaining rents with the fallow rents I would think some would still say i have very affordable rents on the growing crops side
 

franklin

New Member
If you can’t afford a bit of fallow now and again rents are unsustainable. Crop failure is even more expensive and we all know they happen.

I cant help but think the addage that the "first loss is the smallest loss" should be taught to almost everyone in secondary school. As should manual handling of only to pick your children up properly.
 

fudge

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire.
My children like to be picked up in an air conditioned car. Can’t help agreeing that everyone should be able to drive a forklift by the age of 18.
My agronomist’s catch phrase is “the first loss is the best”. He must be well educated.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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