One Man to a Thousand Acres

[Henarar]

Thinking about this made me remember something and you will like it Pete as it was a subsidy fiddle
before SFP we were paid for cattle and sheep by headage and the arable farmers were paid by the acre of crops at a different rate for different crops
A chap I done some work for had very marginal arable land so he started growing linseed as it attracted one of the biggest payments around £250/acre IIRC first couple years he ploughed and planted it in the spring and under-sowed it with grass only in the first year did he combine any linseed and then didn't get much we would cut the grass early in the spring and make silage the put the linseed and grass in then after the first year just top in in the autumn
then he thought of a way to save money and started just direct drilling the linseed into the grass after it had been cut, I drilled it about half rate seed and the cheapest seed he could find, most likely only cost about 25/30 quid an acre per year to do the job and he had the payment and the silage

 

[Henarar]

Jeffrey grows cashcrop peas, beans, triticale, wheat and barley.

But the cover crops have everything from sunflower to carrots and every other thing you could name (and a fair few more)
Should see his cattle I think the last time he did anything more was in the 70s when he disced out the tramlines.


fudge big inputs and big yields
Go no input and bigger yields (lots of cow time in between crops)

Carbon flows around and around
Cash comes out

Abandon monoculture

how often would he drill a crop in the same bit of land ?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

how often would he drill a crop in the same bit of land ?

It really depends what beef is doing as to what he does.
He's a sheep/beef man first off, so the main priority is stock, but he might take 5 or 6 cash crops per decade per paddock?
Not twice a year by any means, all home saved seed too so it's pretty cheap to run.
Leaves all the straw standing and just nips the tips off cereals.
That's who I get my nice pea hay off; I drive his grain truck... nice to have all this spare time to help the one man on his two thousand acres..

Not as cheap as a headage fiddle

 

[Henarar]

It really depends what beef is doing as to what he does.
He's a sheep/beef man first off, so the main priority is stock, but he might take 5 or 6 cash crops per decade per paddock?
Not twice a year by any means, all home saved seed too so it's pretty cheap to run.
Leaves all the straw standing and just nips the tips off cereals.
That's who I get my nice pea hay off; I drive his grain truck... nice to have all this spare time to help the one man on his two thousand acres..

Not as cheap as a headage fiddle

so after he cuts the heads off he mows whats left and makes it in to hay ?

 

[Bury the Trash]

A ploughs function is to bury weeds , not to cultivate, there are better ways to cultivate if there are no weeds

and Trash

 

[Bury the Trash]

 

[Kiwi Pete]

He does outwinter all his cattle too I should say.
Drills all his cereals in the autumn at light rates and the grazing makes them tiller out
Just boxes the stock up in the spring as it takes off through the flattened/trampled/ pulverized covers, and up comes the barley.
Heads it off and drills more cover crop mix in through the standing straw.
By that stage the triticale is good to go..
It's only the peas that he mows off and makes another killing, selling pea straw to gardeners..gotta get peas off the ground as the nitrogen is too strong and hurts the microbes like AN does.
He needs bugger all winter hay because there's just so much on the ground to munch through for his cattle and sheep.

Hardest part of the whole operation is trying to gather his sheep out of paddocks full of sunflowers and carrots and buckwheat

It's like the Amazon basin and in winter it looks like Chernobyl (with sheep and cattle cruising round)

when people say "you can't do that" I say yes you can,,,,,just have to learn how,,, plenty of people do it

Cows and worms Bury the Trash too

 

[Bury the Trash]

Cows and worms

im good @Kiwi Pete ......... but i think there still mightbe a leg or two sticking up ..

 

[Kiwi Pete]

im good @Kiwi Pete ......... but i think there still mightbe a leg or two sticking up ..

Bad enough trying to plough rushes under

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Reckon one of those crimper rollers would be just the thing for incorporating badgers

Bit of good carbon in them.
That's what governments are good for, say they're all about the good of the environment

Then let them ban round-up
Then don't do a f**king thing about Tb even though it's a public health catastrophe, and mean nobody can run big enough mobs of cheap bison to make farms run without diesel.

Twunts

 

[Bury the Trash]

Ahh yes, those crimp rollers,.... affectionately known as 'badger dung spreaders' around here ...maybe some things are best buried......

 

[Henarar]

Ahh yes, those crimp rollers,.... affectionately known as 'badger dung spreaders' around here ...maybe some things are best buried......

deep

 

[ste stuart]

Yeah my carrots do alright, seeded directly on the surface and mulched.
No till potatoes too

I might have to tell them it doesn't work

They'll be devastated

Pete a lot of what your saying sounds really interesting and make a lot of sense.

How would one harvest these no till potatoes though?

Ste

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Pete a lot of what your saying sounds really interesting and make a lot of sense.

How would one harvest these no till potatoes though?

Ste

I just kick the straw off them and there they are- and leave the tops and mulch behind for next time.

I don't know why farmers do everything the hard way, out of habit!

If you plough, cultivate, any soil disturbance wrecks the soil habitat and then you need to keep doing it to keep getting the air "into the mix"
To stop, it takes ages for the soil to heal itself.. so for an established carrot or potato operation they would likely be better to buy a sheep farm and try it there, or grass out an area to let the soil reform.

It does work though

 

[glasshouse]

I just kick the straw off them and there they are- and leave the tops and mulch behind for next time.

I don't know why farmers do everything the hard way, out of habit!

If you plough, cultivate, any soil disturbance wrecks the soil habitat and then you need to keep doing it to keep getting the air "into the mix"
To stop, it takes ages for the soil to heal itself.. so for an established carrot or potato operation they would likely be better to buy a sheep farm and try it there, or grass out an area to let the soil reform.

It does work though

You must like green potatoes.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Not as much as I like green farmers

 

[Robt]

I love the irony that the doubters are discussing this on the Internet.... those same doubters 30 years ago would be saying the internet will never catch on.
Funniest quote was thinking that a tiny combine would fail because it would need a massive spout to tip into an artic..... that’s why some can’t see and some can see

 

[glasshouse]

Well if no till spuds works so well , why arent every spud farmer doing it?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Well if no till spuds works so well , why arent every spud farmer doing it?

Because the past is what they feel comfortable with.

Isn't that what this thread is about, our desire to cling to the past?

 

[glasshouse]

Because the past is what they feel comfortable with.

No, i would say it just wont work on a field scale.
To achieve the sort of soil you describe, it would have to be sown in grass and left for ten yrs.
I dont think the bank manager would go for that.