The Cross slot vs 750a trial

Fuzzy

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Bedfordshire
Honestly, yes I think it would work great. If I wasn't interested in no till that's what I would be doing everywhere. I can't see a problem with it.

As it happens we effectively did it for OSR last week as we couldn't drill into pea stubble without blocking up, so we dumped the seed on top and disced it.
Do you think a Cross slot would have blocked up ?
 
i'm slightly surprised by this. If there are negligible yield differences but lower costs, surely as a commercial farmer your 'interest in no till' would wane?

The thing with broadcasting is that if your into the whole idea of letting worms take the trash down for you and building up your natural drainage and soil resilience then broadcasting is a less desireable system than no till - you could get more erosion and soil capping as well. Also technically no till can be a one pass system if you don't roll whereas broadcasting is probably two or three pass.

That said I will be broadcasting some oilseed rape onto stubble.
 

marco

Member
i'm slightly surprised by this. If there are negligible yield differences but lower costs, surely as a commercial farmer your 'interest in no till' would wane?
what exactly are you suprised by? due to the amount of blackgrass in the uk the last thing alot of farmers want to do is creat another flush when drilling. if you had/have no grass weed problems than fire away.
 
what exactly are you suprised by? due to the amount of blackgrass in the uk the last thing alot of farmers want to do is creat another flush when drilling. if you had/have no grass weed problems than fire away.
I'm sure that even the evangelists use stale seedbeds and glyphosate, as do conventional 'drillers'. I would agree, though, that you are more likely to be successful by using a dd later in the autumn on undisturbed soil than in min tilled/ploughed. if it has been wet, i believe that the drilling date(coupled with favourable weather) is more important to blackgrass control than the method? So in a badly infested field plant a third, say, on Sept 20 another third 20th Oct and final third 5 Nov which one, irrespective of method used, would have the most blackgrass? On another subject I rarely had to use slug pellets in a broadcast crop of wheat. Luck probably.
 
Location
Cheshire
I'm sure that even the evangelists use stale seedbeds and glyphosate, as do conventional 'drillers'. I would agree, though, that you are more likely to be successful by using a dd later in the autumn on undisturbed soil than in min tilled/ploughed. if it has been wet, i believe that the drilling date(coupled with favourable weather) is more important to blackgrass control than the method? So in a badly infested field plant a third, say, on Sept 20 another third 20th Oct and final third 5 Nov which one, irrespective of method used, would have the most blackgrass? On another subject I rarely had to use slug pellets in a broadcast crop of wheat. Luck probably.

So you're going to drill everything early November and not use herbicides that need a specific seed depth?
 
It's been all quiet on the Cross Slot front for a long while, unless I've missed anything. I'm curious to hear how the various different CS users are getting on with a year or so more under their belts.

Thinking back to the 750a vs CS trial, the one thing that I've learnt with the 750a is it is quite a bit worse going into chopped straw than I was expecting. With our clays they are not often totally dry, which means the disc doesn't have anything hard to press the straw against to cut through it. Easy to say, "Just don't grow 2nd wheats", but it also stops winter barley in to heavy spring barley crops, and spring barley into winter wheat stubble. This year even our OSR stubbles are tricky because they were baled leaving tracks of residue left from the bits the baler didn't pick up.

Slot closure has also not been quite as good as I was expecting, although not too bad. The Guttler works fairly well, although on strong soils which damp it often struggles. This problem is helped by the below approach. When I saw the CS working at Groundswell 2016 I thought the result looked pretty bad.

At the moment we're dealing with this problem by shallow cultivating, which has the extra benefit of leaving a drier tilth which I think allows later drilling in the autumn with better establishment and earlier drilling in the spring. Overall, it's not a bad compromise to be at and I am not too worried about this level of shallow disturbance.
 
What's your shallow cultivator of choice?

Terrastar, but I didn't choose it. It's good in some ways, but it doesn't work the soil consistently enough (apparently the number of blades is less than the old Sampo due to patent reasons) for the disc drill to work as well as I'd like.

That said, it's fast and cheap. Something like a Cousins Surface is a lot more expensive.
 
Location
Cambridge
We aren't growing any second wheat this year, otherwise I'd do a MkII trial.

PS that's not because of drills, just rotation. I think not growing second wheat because of machinery is letting the tail wag the dog.
 

Tractor Boy

Member
Location
Suffolk
We aren't growing any second wheat this year, otherwise I'd do a MkII trial.

PS that's not because of drills, just rotation. I think not growing second wheat because of machinery is letting the tail wag the dog.
I'm no longer growing second wheats, partly because of the drills weakness in chopped straw but also because the blackgrass loves a second wheat!
 

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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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