Shocking Yields from direct drilled spring Beans

[Baling Hay]

I think the sort of comment that riles people is when farmers ask people like Gabe Brown about how or whether CA/no-till might work where they live. The answer comes back, "Do you have soil?", which rather patronisingly suggests that this is a system that can be rolled out in a universal manner across the entire planet. To me this seems like a vast oversimplification and the hugely varying climates and soil types around the world mean that every solution is going to be bespoke.

I think Gabe Brown probably can't imagine having soils not dry out. He wants all this trash on the surface to prevent the soils from drying out. Such a difference in soil type and rainfall.

 

[Simon Chiles]

I think you make a very throw away comment that is really not helpful. I tried to start two years ago but the weather closed in both years before the contractor got here. I had two years of rain pounded over wintered soils that I struggled with in the spring and have proved to be in a poor state.
You seem to sugest that I should now put up with this to let the god of no-till to work magic over the next few years, what planet are you on?
No I shall 'make good' where necessary to try to ensure that the winter crops get off to a good start and put good roots down.
Hopefully next year I will have better structured soils from which to start with full no till. Its bloody stupid to start with concrete which a root can barely penetrate when you can help it get off to a good start.

Also I think to call others nay sayers or half hearted rather arrogant when you are in only partial knowledge of their circumstances and know even less of their farms. What works for you is fine but may not work for others, for example if I established an autumn cover crop it would mean that I would have cold, slow drying soils in the spring as the crop whether dead or not would stop the sun and wind from doing their work. On lighter land you would benefit from the moisture retention.
Don't take it upon yourself to make no till into a rigid religion because it is not allways the answer to all problems but a valid method that should be flexible to suit the particular situation. Rules are only made to be broken.

I think you should apologise to @Simon C for this outburst.
He has , very kindly, shown hundreds of farmers around his farm for no remuneration to show them how he has mastered dd on heavy soil. He has provided guidance for numerous people who wish to take the first steps into dd with some of the wisest words written on this forum. Comments like this go a long way to alienating people, and this forum needs his experience to remain successful.

 

[Baling Hay]

From my observations and reading over the past few months I think that the issue of getting the soil to dry quickly in the spring is one of the big challenges to making direct drilling and no-till to work in my particular situation. I do not currently believe that after a few years the soil will have so transformed itself as to allow heavy cover crop residues to be left as a thatch on the soil in the spring and still give an acceptable chance of drilling in good conditions. I also am currently of the view that cover crops sucking up moisture in the spring leaving the soil drier than if they had not been there will not occur on our soils (although I am doing my own trials to check).

Here's just one recent example of how slow our soils are to dry if there is cover over them. Following a glyphosate of extended overwinter stubbles on 15 May which had a lot of black-grass in them (did put pictures up), the field was left with the intention of direct drilling OSR. I waited as long as I could before the rain and tried to drill it with the Mzuri. The soil was still sticky wet and the drill just blocked (which takes quite some doing) up on every bout. So did the wheels, the scrapers and just about everything; it was obviously still far too wet so I stopped. At the same time we were drilling rape into winter barley stubbles with ease. Now of course it has poured with rain (34mm) and the chances are that, left in its current state, the conditions will never be right to get rape in this year in this field. If, on the other hand, we had cultivated even lightly, or if the thatch of black-grass wasn't there, the soil would have dried and we could have drilled easily before this rain.

With the pressure to delay autumn drilling into the first week in October for black-grass control, any system which significantly reduces the ability of the soils to withstand wet weather only further reduces the already very small windows that we have recently been getting to get crops drilled. Whilst I don't mind missing out on bits of land that end up being spring crops, it simply is not acceptable to fail to drill any autumn cereals at all (which has happened in a number of cases that I know of) with any degree of regularity. I think if this was the case then the benefits from no-till would be outweighed by the increased risk introduced.

On the point about whether to wait or not I think that on our soils, especially if they are not bare, you have to wait a long long time for them to dry to be able to drill. This time can be reduced using a disc drill which does not need to go as deep as some of the strip till drills, but one quick pass with a cultivator will allow the soil to dry more in 24hrs than it would in three weeks if left undisturbed and I saw that this year myself.

Maybe sheep grazing the stuff sprayed off would have helped immensely?

 

[SilliamWhale]

Several problems:

Chopped straw on top of wet clay, not ploughed equals a slug infested slab of lard to drill into unless we get a drought between August and October and then you have to drill early to stand any chance of it being dry enough, leading to more disease and weed pressure.

Sterile Brome.

Putting in cover crops just provides more fodder and cover for slugs for us and is another cost.

Plough early, let it weather down, whizz over with power harrow and cheap,old MF30, job done.

That's pragmatism, not ideology.

In circumstances where I bale the straw then zero till works better, but I need to recycle the straw as muck, but I have to plough the muck in.

Maybe one day I'll get there, but I'm lazy and like a result.

You don't have plough muck in

 

[rob1]

Several problems:

Chopped straw on top of wet clay, not ploughed equals a slug infested slab of lard to drill into unless we get a drought between August and October and then you have to drill early to stand any chance of it being dry enough, leading to more disease and weed pressure.

Sterile Brome.

Putting in cover crops just provides more fodder and cover for slugs for us and is another cost.

Plough early, let it weather down, whizz over with power harrow and cheap,old MF30, job done.

That's pragmatism, not ideology.

In circumstances where I bale the straw then zero till works better, but I need to recycle the straw as muck, but I have to plough the muck in.

Maybe one day I'll get there, but I'm lazy and like a result.

Why plough the muck in? we pile it in heaps to rot down and then just spread it and drill through it let the worms drag it down,

 

[SilliamWhale]

I think you make a very throw away comment that is really not helpful. I tried to start two years ago but the weather closed in both years before the contractor got here. I had two years of rain pounded over wintered soils that I struggled with in the spring and have proved to be in a poor state.
You seem to sugest that I should now put up with this to let the god of no-till to work magic over the next few years, what planet are you on?
No I shall 'make good' where necessary to try to ensure that the winter crops get off to a good start and put good roots down.
Hopefully next year I will have better structured soils from which to start with full no till. Its bloody stupid to start with concrete which a root can barely penetrate when you can help it get off to a good start.

Also I think to call others nay sayers or half hearted rather arrogant when you are in only partial knowledge of their circumstances and know even less of their farms. What works for you is fine but may not work for others, for example if I established an autumn cover crop it would mean that I would have cold, slow drying soils in the spring as the crop whether dead or not would stop the sun and wind from doing their work. On lighter land you would benefit from the moisture retention.
Don't take it upon yourself to make no till into a rigid religion because it is not allways the answer to all problems but a valid method that should be flexible to suit the particular situation. Rules are only made to be broken.

This is daft. I don't read that is what he is saying at all. Can we all get over the religion thing please - its really tedious, the rationale behind wanting to no till isn't about cutting your nose off to spite your face its doing it because it can be done! (and consistently and successfully)

 

[SilliamWhale]

Maybe sheep grazing the stuff sprayed off would have helped immensely?

Problem with that. Arable farmer: flexible but only flexible within defined parameters.

 

[SilliamWhale]

Why plough the muck in? we pile it in heaps to rot down and then just spread it and drill through it let the worms drag it down,

It is the greatest thing of all for arable soils. For the little bit of theoretical N you save it brings so much body to the land.

 

[Feldspar]

Maybe sheep grazing the stuff sprayed off would have helped immensely?

I agree that generally it probably would. In this particular instance though it was just black-grass and I seem to remember Tim May saying that sheep didn't much like black-grass (unfortunately).

 

[rob1]

I think you make a very throw away comment that is really not helpful. I tried to start two years ago but the weather closed in both years before the contractor got here. I had two years of rain pounded over wintered soils that I struggled with in the spring and have proved to be in a poor state.
You seem to sugest that I should now put up with this to let the god of no-till to work magic over the next few years, what planet are you on?
No I shall 'make good' where necessary to try to ensure that the winter crops get off to a good start and put good roots down.
Hopefully next year I will have better structured soils from which to start with full no till. Its bloody stupid to start with concrete which a root can barely penetrate when you can help it get off to a good start.

Also I think to call others nay sayers or half hearted rather arrogant when you are in only partial knowledge of their circumstances and know even less of their farms. What works for you is fine but may not work for others, for example if I established an autumn cover crop it would mean that I would have cold, slow drying soils in the spring as the crop whether dead or not would stop the sun and wind from doing their work. On lighter land you would benefit from the moisture retention.
Don't take it upon yourself to make no till into a rigid religion because it is not allways the answer to all problems but a valid method that should be flexible to suit the particular situation. Rules are only made to be broken.

To be fair Simon has very heavy ground and he has shown many the way to go with wet low lying ground, while I have not visited his farm I have seen enough from pictures and from others that know him to know that if he can make it work on his farm then we all can, he has tried cover crops and if I remember correctly says that they arent so good on wet ground, I and many others have learnt a huge amount from him

 

[Feldspar]

On a general note I think the fantastic thing about this forum is that nearly all discussions proceed with people thinking and writing very different things, having healthy disagreements but still generally learning a lot from each other. A feature of other forums that I've seen is that far to quickly / often the debates reduce to personal attacks. I'm not saying I've never strayed from this aim, but let's try and try and address arguments respectfully and respect other people's point of view. Following on from a comment that Clive made about keeping quiet about what he's learnt, if all of the people with huge experience did that then this forum would suffer a great loss and I would be very sad for one. So chaps (and chapesses) let's keep away from low-brow mud slinging.

 

[mikep]

I think you should apologise to @Simon C for this outburst.
He has , very kindly, shown hundreds of farmers around his farm for no remuneration to show them how he has mastered dd on heavy soil. He has provided guidance for numerous people who wish to take the first steps into dd with some of the wisest words written on this forum. Comments like this go a long way to alienating people, and this forum needs his experience to remain successful.

I do not know of @Simon C situation and if he has got a sytem that works on his land all well and good. It is also admirable if he shares his sucess with others but I stand by the fact that what works for him may be a guide to others but cannot be a prescription. I hate being preached to by anybody especially in something as individual as these matters. I did not call others nay sayers or half hearted it was he who used those terms and if he feels that way about other differing views all well and good but he must allow me to beg to differ.
If you see my post as an outburst then that is your view but you must also allow me to see his post from my perpective and I wrote what I felt not to do anything other than put across my point of view, also I don't do subtle.
There was nothing personal in my post so I am sure that @Simon C would agree no apology is necessary

 

[Feldspar]

Returning vaguely to the topic when I watch that video of the Simtec working at Goldilocks my initial reaction was that it appears to move quite a bit of soil. I always think of Claydons and Mzuris as strip till drills or direct drills but certainly not no-till drills. Is a Simtec a no-till drill with that amount of disturbance?

 

[dontknowanything]

Returning vaguely to the topic when I watch that video of the Simtec working at Goldilocks my initial reaction was that it appears to move quite a bit of soil. I always think of Claydons and Mzuris as strip till drills or direct drills but certainly not no-till drills. Is a Simtec a no-till drill with that amount of disturbance?

I posted about this a few days ago (and about 120 posts!). Its problem is close row spacing, leading to almost no undisturbed soil.

 

[rob1]

I posted about this a few days ago (and about 120 posts!). Its problem is close row spacing, leading to almost no undisturbed soil.

was it the grassland version which IIRC is 125 mm centres or the arable one at 150mm? I hired the arable one and you had a job to see where it had been, I agree totally that the less soil you move the less weeds you get, but sometimes a bit of movement helps the planted seed by mineralising a bit of N and helping dry the soil in wet conditions so it can be a two way sword depending on the conditions

 

[doorknob]

Just started harvesting our spring beans, some of which were direct drilled with the 8m simtech through a dry crust but into wet slubber underneath. Compared with yields of beans drilled with our Kockerling after some cultivations, yields are much lower. Not all done yet but first few fields showing around 2t/Ha for direct drilled compared with 3-4 t/ha after cultivations !
Have always thought that large seeded crops can cope with DD better and indeed in the past have had fantastic results sowing spring beans early, direct into very heavy frosts with a horsch sprinter. Not sure what went wrong this year, maybe it was just too wet underneath after the record winter rainfall?

Much of my reduced yields in dd/no-till have been from herbicide carry over.

I've also found that legumes in dd/no-till seem to require frequent limestone applications of lesser amounts to keep the top few inches of soil, where the seed germinates and emerges from, in good order. DD/no-till will in fact, "stratify" nutrients, and in higher rainfall areas with higher residue loads, the top couple inches have shown 3-5 points lower ph. If I could find my soil samples that I had taken at specific depths, I would post them to show the ph difference after only 2 years of no-till.

 

[dontknowanything]

was it the grassland version which IIRC is 125 mm centres or the arable one at 150mm? I hired the arable one and you had a job to see where it had been, I agree totally that the less soil you move the less weeds you get, but sometimes a bit of movement helps the planted seed by mineralising a bit of N and helping dry the soil in wet conditions so it can be a two way sword depending on the conditions

Not sure, probably arable, it was 4m. It's a good drill, and pretty versatile I think, but the field we used it on looked like it had been cultivated afterwards (into OSR stubble)

 

[SilliamWhale]

Much of my reduced yields in dd/no-till have been from herbicide carry over.

I've also found that legumes in dd/no-till seem to require frequent limestone applications of lesser amounts to keep the top few inches of soil, where the seed germinates and emerges from, in good order. DD/no-till will in fact, "stratify" nutrients, and in higher rainfall areas with higher residue loads, the top couple inches have shown 3-5 points lower ph. If I could find my soil samples that I had taken at specific depths, I would post them to show the ph difference after only 2 years of no-till.

does grassland get stratified too?

 

[doorknob]

does grassland get stratified too?

Our grass for seed land sure does. Some varieties can go for 9-10 years and all nutrients are broadcast. Decomposing residue with high rain fall acidifies the surface couple inches a great amount.

I found one of my stratified samples, but it is on image shack, and they have recently turned commy. So I dont know for sure if this image will show up or not, but I'll try. This was after only a couple years of not tilling this field, but growing annual crops. Planted with a JD 1590.
View attachment aimagizer.imageshack.us_v2_150x100q90_651_samplecq.png

I cant seem to get it to link.

 

[shakerator]

Our grass for seed land sure does. Some varieties can go for 9-10 years and all nutrients are broadcast. Decomposing residue with high rain fall acidifies the surface couple inches a great amount.

I found one of my stratified samples, but it is on image shack, and they have recently turned commy. So I dont know for sure if this image will show up or not, but I'll try. This was after only a couple years of not tilling this field, but growing annual crops. Planted with a JD 1590.
View attachment 64712

I cant seem to get it to link.

i see a lot more moss.
probably acidity