Written by cpm
Few growers with blackgrass would be foolhardy enough to drill wheat this month, say experts. CPM visits a grower in Suffolk to find delayed drilling is just one of a number of strategies used to keep grassweeds at bay. In the past I’ve depended on an answer in a can, but these days that’s the option of last resort. By Tom Allen-Stevens Edward Vipond leads the way through the maize headland – a towering crop of over 6ft tall – which eventually breaks to reveal a 6.5ha stunning crop of sunflowers. The heads hang heavy on stout stems, and almost every floret is occupied by a bumble bee, seemingly entranced in a nectar-induced torpor. “This could be a wish crop, in that I could be saying ‘I wish I’d never grown it’,” he says. “But apart from the cost of the seed, a light pre-emergence herbicide and 30kgN/ha, it hasn’t cost a penny to grow, so I won’t need much yield for it to become a viable new break crop.” Blackgrass emerged into the spring beans in this “failure field” in areas that weren’t sprayed out in the previous wheat crop. The field was established after the winter oilseed…
The post Weed control – Drill stays in the shed in the ‘new normal’ appeared first on cpm magazine.
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