What is wrong with this?

[Chalky]

Cost of micronutrients low, and why get a low result & then ignore it. Save the testing cost.Did that for B on cereals at the 'experts' request-not any more!

We do annual trial strips on macros. Biggest result years ago was 30kg/ha N as foliar urea in drizzle at booting. 1.5t/ha better off. That and N/S ratios & grain proteins have pulled our applied N up on cereals by 25%. For simplicity we use Fibrophos in autumn-but I am always aware that the 'freshness' of a spring base application may be missing out.

But we monitor-and the battle with potash etc means we are sticking in an in season K,Mg S dressing that may become policy, to keep these macros at hopefully less yield depressing levels. Trialling on wheat, and will use on our silage land that it will suit alongside urea. For AD so Mg not an issue.

Definately legs in foliar K-though the reason eludes me as to why it should work. I think one of the members has done some DIY work on this. Is there any update?

 

[Flintstone]

rolling average 4.5-4.8 t/ha. Cannot profess to be in the 5 Tonne club! 2016 was at the bottom end of that range.

So, did you actually get 4.5 in 2016? Must have been a national record for last summer!

 

[Chalky]

yes

 

[Flintstone]

Nice one. I wish I could do that. A good year for me is 4.25, and an average is 3.6, and last year was 2.67. :-(

 

[Brisel]

Nice one. I wish I could do that. A good year for me is 4.25, and an average is 3.6, and last year was 2.67. :-(

Ditto here. I don't know about you but I think we're missing something. Do you think it's nutrition?

 

[Flintstone]

Yeah. Seven pints of Carlsberg down the Dog & Duck ;-)

 

[Brisel]

Yeah. Seven pints of Carlsberg down the Dog & Duck ;-)

Don't forget the Farmers Weekly article too

 

[Mr Charisma]

With out rubbing any salt into any wounds last year the cropping pages were full of posts with folks mocking those of us who use serviced agronomy and being led up the garden path with a very pro active use of ,micro nutrients ,,,, almost as if we were being openly robbed ,,,,,,
I have always been fairly proactive in my use of micro nutrients and it seems to work for me .

Last years rape is just leaving the farm at the moment and hopefully will be nearly just shy of 4 t / ha ,,,,,,, quite pleasing really considering the amount of sub 3 ton / ha in the area ,,,,,, tho my agronomist reckoned the HOLL variety I used wasn't so badly affected

But out of interest can anyone remember who started the 'pub yields' thread all those years ago as it seems to be referred to on a regular basis

 

[Brisel]

I've quoted the Pub Yields gag a few times. I've recently found out who originally wrote it too - a certain contributor to Arable Farming, Crop Production Magazine, Farmers Weekly and now senior NFU...

I dismissed high margin sales of "snake oil" treatments pushed by distributor agronomists because in replicated multi year independent trials they never showed consistent returns. It is all well and good to say they are cheap but a litre of this and a kg of that soon adds up when you put it in every spring tank load on every crop.

What I'm reading in threads like this makes me question what might be worth trying myself. Every day is a school day.

 

[Chalky]

In fairness Brisel, it is our soil(obviously) that brings the problems. High pH and Ca cause a heap of issues-that a lot of relatively cheap things fix & make the whole job a lot better. Lots of UK soils have relatively few micro problems-though they need lime. Nobody complains about feeding the plant lime, its so obvious, why get excited about the little things that hassle you when there is too much of the damn stuff?

 

[Feldspar]

@Brisel -- thanks for the link.

This is the first year in a few that I've decided to ditch tissue testing. I think the AHDB work on micronutrients, some messing around with Albrecht, a particularly persuasive talk by Andrew Watson at last year's NIAB conference, and a some local trials on chalky boulder clay by our agronomist using full range micro-nutrient and Delta T combined to make me give up worrying about micronutrients.

We're on chalky boulder clay with pHs about 7.5-8.

That said, we did have clear sulphur deficiency in OSR early on in the autumn once which took us very much by surprise. Tissue tests showed S way down.

This year our OSR look good from a distance, but close up the leaves look a bit odd. Maybe because we've only just go the N on and this is holding things up.

 

[horizontal]

Pictures shown where leaves are cupped is almost certainly astrokerb if you used it. Picto seems very sensitive to it. Had Dow look at the problem last year as it's happened two years running here - picto stood out relative to extrovert, Elgar and Nikita. Last year it went on to yield 4.6t so no underlying issues but I left out the teb I planned for LLS and PGR as I thought it would be too harsh and just used proline for stem extension instead.