The Drought

[Farmer Roy]

Agree with you there, the weather can be such a pain in the arse in the UK that your plans have to change to fit in around it all the time.
Every farm and every farmer is different, you farm to your conditions, not someone else's.
Having lived and worked in 3 continents, I've found the most important thing to do is adapt to the locals. What worked at the 'other place' could be totally wrong at the next place. Even locally farmers have totally different ideas that you have to adapt to as an employee, even if you don't agree with some.
If you swapped farms both people would have a big change.

I'd love to see @Bossfarmer and @Farmer Roy swap places for a year

How about a new TV show, Farm Swap?

it’s a land of extremes here
You have to be adaptable & flexible to survive.
I’ve had more than my share of extreme wet weather / soil as well, farming on a floodplain & dry lake beds

incidentally, the reason I got into zero till was because of a run of wet years & the ground was too wet to cultivate. Why bugger around with multiple passes & compacting the sh!t out of your soil when you can just put the seed into the ground ? That’s all you need to do . . .
Farming in dry lake beds had its challenges to

 

[Farmer_Joe]

I realise if I changed farming techniques my field wouldn't look like a beach and wouldn't be blowing away.

Animals! They are part of problem. Over 100 suckler cows have lived on that 18 acre field from October to end of January. It was sown with a catch crop of forage rape after spring barley. A tractor with feed cart was hauling out silage bales every 2nd day which made some deep ruts as winter was quite wet.

So in my wisdom or lack of, I ploughed it to get it level again. This levelled it and removed a lot of compaction. The cows didn't have flotations. Weigh 7-800kg each.

I could get rid of cows, sow a cover crop after harvest and wait till next spring and go in with a direct drill.

Christ no offence, but if my fields began to look like the beach i think its time to have a serious rethink, just reminds me of a chapter from growing a revolution where Gabe Brown i believe is describing the destruction done to soil in the 'dust belt'

 

[Bossfarmer]

Agree with you there, the weather can be such a pain in the arse in the UK that your plans have to change to fit in around it all the time.
Every farm and every farmer is different, you farm to your conditions, not someone else's.
Having lived and worked in 3 continents, I've found the most important thing to do is adapt to the locals. What worked at the 'other place' could be totally wrong at the next place. Even locally farmers have totally different ideas that you have to adapt to as an employee, even if you don't agree with some.
If you swapped farms both people would have a big change.

I'd love to see @Bossfarmer and @Farmer Roy swap places for a year

How about a new TV show, Farm Swap?

too much rain would be his problem here

 

[CornishTone]

All that is a long winded way of saying, we ought to take a lot more care of our soils.

Bingo!

 

[CornishTone]

too much rain would be his problem here

And not enough of it would be your problem there!

 

[Farmer Roy]

And not enough of it would be your problem there!

err, I’ve had 30” of rain in November, just weeks before wheat harvest. The whole farm was knee deep in water for weeks. Wheat & barley rotted & fell over. Windrows of canola floated away . . .

another winter, I had seven individual flood peaks come through my place just after finishing wheat planting. The place was literally underwater from July to September & I was only just able to get grain sorghum planted in November

It’s not all dry & dust here

I’ve also lost a 1000 acres of barley due to a very late frost at flowering time

it is every extreme you can imagine

and that is normal

that is why our soils & our management has to be resilient enough to survive

 

[Spencer]

it’s a land of extremes here
You have to be adaptable & flexible to survive.
I’ve had more than my share of extreme wet weather / soil as well, farming on a floodplain & dry lake beds

incidentally, the reason I got into zero till was because of a run of wet years & the ground was too wet to cultivate. Why bugger around with multiple passes & compacting the sh!t out of your soil when you can just put the seed into the ground ? That’s all you need to do . . .
Farming in dry lake beds had its challenges to

Tyres are running nice a clean though

 

[Brisel]

Which establishment cost more? .......

Which one looks the better investment? I'm sure he will tell us in August...

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Totally agree, I am not denying that at all. I was just rebutting bossfarmers idea that it should be illegal to have a farm without animals! You can build soils without them, but they obviously help a great deal.
We are actively looking at ways to integrate livestock into our system and are going to work with a local sheep farmer to start with.

Fungi builds soil. How you increase the fungal diversity and mass matters very little.

However the "mixed farming" model can easily increase bacterial mass faster than fungal mass, which is why farms can become less resilient and more hungry over time - kinda what Roy is always saying, "leave lots of residue"

 

[glasshouse]

That’s really not what I said, you have jumped to some wild conclusions here. I am actively trying to get livestock into the system, I know the benefits.
Boss farmer said it should be illegal to have a farm without livestock which is ridiculous, I just suggested a couple of ways you can build soil that don’t involve animals.
I farm our own land aswell as rent and contract farm, I spend my own money and am tasked with spending others. Soil health and profit is our priority, if I can prove a business case to re-introduce livestock then I will do it.

Haha
“Make a business case to re introduce livestock”
You could never make that case to landowners who are used to the extractive industry of arable farming.
Hell would freeze over first

 

[glasshouse]

I strongly suspect it's the ridiculous use of the word "drought" that upsets the antipodeans most on TFF. Most UK farmers have no idea what a drought really is. It certainly isn't a few weeks without rainfall.

That was a wynd up

 

[glasshouse]

err, I’ve had 30” of rain in November, just weeks before wheat harvest. The whole farm was knee deep in water for weeks. Wheat & barley rotted & fell over. Windrows of canola floated away . . .

another winter, I had seven individual flood peaks come through my place just after finishing wheat planting. The place was literally underwater from July to September & I was only just able to get grain sorghum planted in November

It’s not all dry & dust here

it is every extreme you can imagine

and that is normal

that is why our soils & our management has to be resilient enough to survive

You are lucky to have deep soils
Ours are about 9 inches

 

[Farmer Roy]

too much rain would be his problem here

believe me, I’ve had too much rain at times. Nearly broke me, but I got through & I learned a lot


see the above posts

 

[Farmer Roy]

Tyres are running nice a clean though

heavy deep black clay soils.
there is anywhere from 6 - 12 metres of black clay under this
You’re ( generally ) ok driving through it when under water, but it’s the edges that get you stuck, getting the chaser bins out onto hard ground to load the trucks is the problem

 

[Farmer Roy]

This is the Simpson Desert, in Central Australia. Summer time temps are in excess of 50 C
This was early spring, late September.
Max daytime temps high 20’s C - 30 C, with overnight frosts.
It had rained 2 weeks earlier, but if you dig down say 100 mm, or where the bike tyres were breaking traction, the sand was still damp. The darker sand behind the bike in the pic is damp sand

So, excuse me for wondering why a sandy desert soil with those sort of temps can still hold moisture, when your ideal, carefully managed agricultural fields can be dry two weeks after the wettest winter ever ?

even the tops of the sand dunes still had moisture under them

 

[Farmer Roy]

Tyres are running nice a clean though

only when they are running in water

we have also had to use rice combines from down south with 4wd or tracks at times, as we couldn’t travel

Got caught at the wrong end of the paddock when a storm hit. This black stuff sticks like sh!t to a blanket when it’s wet, impossible to walk on as it keeps building up on your boots

 

[oil barron]

Farmer Roy has it easy. Deep rich soils that can grow high value crops like cotton that U.K. farmers can only dream of. You just need to farm it the years it can be supported and go and spend nothing on it and go and get a job when the weather turns. A soft cock like him would never understand the continual slog of low margin U.K. farming where you have to persevere every year.

 

[Farmer Roy]

Must be crook if they need money from the public purse every year in a brown paper bag . . .
So lucky we don’t have subsidies


although cotton is not so high value since coronavirus, I’ve dropped it from my rotation for this year

mungbeans & sunflowers are where the money is, at around $1000 / t

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Get the plough out Roy, keep it going until you've only got 9 inches of soil left to turn. You'll have plenty of moisture by then.

 

[oil barron]

Must be crook if they need money from the public purse every year in a brown paper bag . . .
So lucky we don’t have subsidies


although cotton is not so high value since coronavirus, I’ve dropped it from my rotation for this year

mungbeans & sunflowers are where the money is, at around $1000 / t

the brown bags a retirement scheme for unemployables. Got Fuq all to do with farming really.

if you are on a lake, you must have an aquifer below you. Why don’t you drill some wells and plant nuts.