Old John
Member
- Location
- N E Suffolk
We've been using a GD for about 15 months now and planted hundreds of acres of OSR and stubble turnips and had no problems. Many of the farmers where we have planted stubble turnips have been very impressed with how shallow we can plant and the good crops behind the drill.Thanks again for your replies. I have experimented with no nitrogen down the spout in the spring with the seedhawk Tyne when sowing barley under sowed with white clover. Sometimes it works just fine but if we have a dry spell at the time of drilling or for a few weeks after I have found broadcast N is lost to the atmosphere and the crop really suffers . Hence I always like to make sure I sow N when drilling in the spring. Autumn sowing is different as the window for N seems to be longer and conditions cooler with more heavy dews. Our base fertility for P and K is very high so not so necessary to put down the spout. Maybe if I went the weaving Gd route we need to keep the seedhawk to cover ourselves but I like the look of the weaving very low disturbance for reducing our herbicide bill overtime. The old locals in our area say if you took all the weed seeds out of our soil it would drop a foot!!
I had the impression from the sales pitch that the weaving was an all round no tillage machine but maybe that is not quite the case in relation to sowing very small seeds.
Interesting you are not allowed to sow N down the spout in the autumn as here the authorities seem keen for us to use the this new overseer model to count our N losses over a year and that still allows N use in the autumn. The use of overseer then allocates N use to each farm based on historical use so dairy farms end up with a lot higher N allocation than cropping farms.( called grandfathering of N rights ).