- Location
- Suffolk
Thats why I stopped buggering about with variable rate!Im sure there was something in some Hutchinson or Agrovista bumph about this recently.
From experience I don’t think it matters but in the case of autumn sown crops, creating a stale seed bed then sowing really wide rows will probably be bad for blackgrass, if you are zero tilling and not disturbing soil it shouldn’t be such a problem.
The plants seem to have bigger ears but less of them
I also think it is variety dependant also for wheat.
spring oats and barley don’t seem to mind a wider row but spring wheat does.
the problem we have is all these things are looked at in isolation and not as part of a whole farming system.
A trial may say tight row spacing out yielded wide row spacing, but then you find out it was late drilled wheat after sugar beet.
You might get it the other way around, but it was direct drilled on 10th September.
I was speaking to someone yesterday who has travelled all around farms all over the world doing a Nuffield. Talking about variable seed rate. The Americans had been there and done it, reckoned it was pointless. Get enough plants and Mother Nature regulates itself either by thinning down/putting bigger ears etc etc (within reason using sensible seed rates)