The future of arable cropping

B'o'B

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Rutland
Back in the early 2000's the wheat price was £60 a tonne and they couldn't sell min-till gear fast enough as people sought to ditch the cost of ploughing. This was just prior to the introduction of Atlantis, where fop and dim (and IPU) chemistry was all the rage. Of course the BG populations exploded and surprise, surprise, the stuff became resistant to graminicides.

Low rate fungicide use was all the rage as well because it all worked so well on septoria.
Rothemstead diaries from the 1800’s for the Boardwalk experiment state that blackgrass was a big problem for arable farming there even then. So that is when the plough was king and there was no herbicides, never-mind herbicide resistance.
 
Rothemstead diaries from the 1800’s for the Boardwalk experiment state that blackgrass was a big problem for arable farming there even then. So that is when the plough was king and there was no herbicides, never-mind herbicide resistance.

Of course.

Only for a time the plough and graminicides like topik kept on top of it. Then min till happened and resistance occurred. Then atlantis came on the scene. How many years did the industry get out of it?
 

B'o'B

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Rutland
Of course.

Only for a time the plough and graminicides like topik kept on top of it. Then min till happened and resistance occurred. Then atlantis came on the scene. How many years did the industry get out of it?
More years than Bayer expected I think! maybe a decade of good control and five years of reducing control.
 

Two Tone

Member
Mixed Farmer
Rothemstead diaries from the 1800’s for the Boardwalk experiment state that blackgrass was a big problem for arable farming there even then. So that is when the plough was king and there was no herbicides, never-mind herbicide resistance.
Ploughing is not the complete answer, but part of it.
You get an instant 70% reduction in Blackgrass if done properly. But you also get a better crop establishment and a more competitive crop.

Other tools in the box are rotation and specific BG herbicides (not glyphosate).

Rotation means no 2nd wheats as these are the most vulnerable. Grow Hybrid Barley here as it outcompetes the BG.
I don’t grow spring crops if I can help it.
OSR where kerb still works is the break crop. Drill it early to get over CSFB problems. I muck ahead of it and plough then combi drill it.

I use 4 litres of Crystal + 0.2 of DFF. Then Avadex in both my wheat and barley crops. No other herbicides all year. That covers everything. Atlantis type products are a waste of time here and avoided.
 
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Two Tone

Member
Mixed Farmer
Ironically my cleanest crops have been 2nd wheats! using just liberator at 0.6l followed by a spot spray of glyphosate on the odd survivor in May. Most likely crops for Blackgrass seed return are spring peas and linseed. Hows that for going against the grain!
What works on some farms, won’t necessarily work on others. I found that Beans cause a huge problem with BG seed return here.

What worries me is the wet autumn we’ve had where people haven’t managed to get any sprays on after drilling.
No matter what system you use, if you don’t get those sprays on, BG is going to explode again with avengance and make the problem bad for at least the next 3 years.
If you can’t spray your pre-ems after drilling, don’t drill it.
 

ajd132

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Suffolk
Ploughing is not the complete answer, but part of it.
You get an instant 70% reduction in Blackgrass if done properly. But you also get a better crop establishment and a more competitive crop.

Other tools in the box are rotation and specific BG herbicides (not glyphosate).

Rotation means no 2nd wheats as these are the most vulnerable. Grow Hybrid Barley here as it outcompetes the BG.
I don’t grow spring crops if I can help it.
OSR where kerb still works is the break crop. Drill it early to get over CSFB problems. I muck ahead of it and plough then combi drill it.

I use 4 litres of Crystal + 0.2 of DFF. Then Avadex in both my wheat and barley crops. No other herbicides all year. That covers everything. Atlantis type products are a waste of time here and avoided.
Same herbicides we use in zero till wheat.
 

Two Tone

Member
Mixed Farmer
Same herbicides we use in zero till wheat.
Zero till is an option I am looking at. But I needed to return to the plough to get my BG back under control first.
In previous years has been shown to work well around here on the lighter and medium soils, but not so well on the really heavier stuff.

There were a lot of Weaving and Claydon demonstrations planned in this area this Autumn. None of which took place, ours included.
I haven’t seen a single field around here that was Zero till drilled apart from some rape. That has worked well on some areas, but was drilled early and in very good conditions.

In a normal year, one of the attractions of Zero till to me is that you don’t have to delay drilling, compared to Min till.

It seems to me you either plough it and bury the BG seed properly, which will stop 70% if it germinating and which only 30% would remain viable if you plough back up the following year, or you min till and don’t mix the BG seed through the soil profile.
This will depend on the continued use of a lot of Glyphosate and how long is this going to be allowed?

I am a one man band here now, with help if needed from my neighbour with a special Labour and Machinery share agreement we designed a few years ago.
Even so, Zero till is an attractive option as it would save a lot of my time, particularly in the hours I spend ploughing.

However, I have all the kit I need to plough it all and I really enjoyed doing it all myself this autumn. I got it all drilled, whereas nearly everybody else didn’t.
The other frightening factor is the investment in a Zero till drill, that would become scrap, the minute Glyphosate is banned!


Edit:
Ironically, my share agreement neighbour, still uses (our) Min till equipment to do all of his and got maybe 10% of his drilling done, half of which is now written off!
 
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Brisel

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Midlands
A zero till drill wouldn't be scrap without glyphosate. You'd just need one capable of drilling into cultivated land which most of the common disc and tine drills do well. Just add a couple of wheel track eradicator tines.
 

ajd132

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Suffolk
I don’t really understand this idea about zero till being dead in the water without glyphosate. If I had plough every acre every year and repeatedly cultivate it there would be no where near enough money left for me to want to bother. Zero till, mulches, inter row mowing/hoeing etc that’s the way I will go. I can’t plough and don’t want to learn how to, I don’t want to spend my life on a tractor and crop walking with muddy boots!
 
More years than Bayer expected I think! maybe a decade of good control and five years of reducing control.

yes, Bayer were well aware in its first year of widespread use that there was at least one case of RRR resistance...

Resistance to Lexus transferred almost directly across - mode of action v similar as molecules closely related was the best guess explanation at the time.
 

Cowcorn

Member
Mixed Farmer
I don’t really understand this idea about zero till being dead in the water without glyphosate. If I had plough every acre every year and repeatedly cultivate it there would be no where near enough money left for me to want to bother. Zero till, mulches, inter row mowing/hoeing etc that’s the way I will go. I can’t plough and don’t want to learn how to, I don’t want to spend my life on a tractor and crop walking with muddy boots!
You cant plough !!!!!!! WTF !!! Dont worry youre young enough to learn . Ploughing is good for the soul .
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
I don’t really understand this idea about zero till being dead in the water without glyphosate.

it’s what people who need another excuse why they don't do it say to make themselves feel better

second only to the “i’ve got heavier soil that anyone” excuse
 

ajd132

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Suffolk
You cant plough !!!!!!! WTF !!! Dont worry youre young enough to learn . Ploughing is good for the soul .
It’s also expensive and time consuming personally I think there’s better use of time rather than making fields slowly brown!
i have done abit in the last but it was boring.
 
Indeed good ploughing is truly the cheapest herbicode you can use . Before the advent o f chemical solutions ploughing was very important and a good ploughman commanded a premium . Maybe going forward as we lose more and more chemical control options the plough will be making a big comeback ..
Couch was a serious problem before roundup and as a small boy iremember walking behind the drill with my father gathering up rhizomes on the headlands and especially around electricity poles . The reekie harrow and the coulters could spread the pest through the field if you were not careful. Without roundup that pest could make a comeback and systems like strip till could come seriously unstuck .

How much does ploughing cost per acre incl fuel?

Roundupping a stubble costs me £3 acre and then I drill a nice crop into the old residue. No erosion, no carbon emissions, no brown streams, no mud on the tyres etc. If ploughing is so great why did we use roundup to get rid of couch? Its almost as if these boy ploughing don't use any herbicides at all!
 

Two Tone

Member
Mixed Farmer
I don't have blackgrass and I don't plough
I bet you have never had Blackgrass on your land.
You want to hope I don't come stamping my muddy boots over it!
How much does ploughing cost per acre incl fuel?

Roundupping a stubble costs me £3 acre and then I drill a nice crop into the old residue. No erosion, no carbon emissions, no brown streams, no mud on the tyres etc. If ploughing is so great why did we use roundup to get rid of couch? Its almost as if these boy ploughing don't use any herbicides at all!
Ploughing never was the answer for Couch control, as you know full well, was it?
What about the methane emissions from your rotting crop residue left unburied on the surface?

Ploughing probably costs a lot less than you think.
How much does it cost to run your sprayer?
I only now use Glyphosate for OSR where necessary.
Its environmental wreckage!
As for the Environment, CO2 and methane emissions, a certain well-known NIAB / Ag Uni professor and I are going to be doing a lot of research on this (on BG infested land) to see what the true facts are about it all and just how good or bad each system really is environmentally per kg of wheat produced.

It will include everything from all types of crop establishment, all sprays used and in particular Nitrate usage (inc. CO2 sequestration).
We want to establish all the fact and not just the half-truth (usually the bad news) opinions.


I have already established that using optimal levels of Nitrate (which here is RB209 less 20%) sequestrates 2.5 times MORE tonnes of CO2 than the actual weight of the grain we sell, compared to a crop that had no nitrate applied.

Which begs the question: When are we going to get paid for this service we do to the environment?
 

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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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