Spring Hope
Sitting here writing this on April Fool’s Day, a full nine months since my last article, I’m wondering if I am the fool for believing farming was improving! The farm seems to have fared well through the winter in general. A nice, easy autumn, so we should be happy. Well, I was until the Tango Man decided to bomb the Middle East. I know he is not into reading or a details man, but with recent historical events in Afghanistan and Iraq, you would think he would realise that these kinds of incursions never end well. Just shows in farming how exposed we can be to events completely out of our control. We are okay for this season’s fertiliser, but if the price for next season’s does not reduce from its current highs, we will all have to think seriously about having a year off and leaving the drill in the shed.
Having walked some of our early drilled wheats (22nd of September), there is a little bit of BYDV showing. Neither myself nor my agronomist could find hardly any aphids in our wheat last autumn, but there were obviously a few there. I think next year, our early drilled wheats will be drilled with Goldfinch, which looks fantastic, just to lower the risk. Some people may ask why do you not just spray an insecticide in the autumn? My answer is threefold: when I have applied insecticides in the past, they have made me feel ill with bad headaches. Secondly, speaking to my agronomist today, he has been sending off aphid samples as they have been sprayed four times this year with an insecticide and the crop is still full of them – this is not sustainable. Lastly, I am a strong believer that using insecticides beget the use of insecticides. Our insect pressure is lower than most, but is not perfect, so this is why the use of BYDV-tolerant genetics feels necessary.
The wheat came out of the winter with high disease pressure of brown rust and septoria. Our Nelson is the worst, blends a lot better, and Goldfinch is very clean. Even though our wheat had autumn nutrition, it could not stop the disease from taking hold. After the disaster of one field of Crusoe two years ago, where we missed a T0 fungicide in similar conditions and lost half the yield, I am not willing to leave the crops’ fate to nutrition and “magic potions” in some vain hope it will be alright. There’s not enough money in the job to chase rainbows anymore; I need a decent crop to harvest!
We only have one small field of winter beans this year (luckily mixed with winter peas), and it has been hit hard by chocolate spot. Fortunately, we saw it early, and the beans are now recovering; some died, but most survived. This year, the beans are only a scaffold to hold up the peas. At £200/t, beans do not make financial sense to grow. I had Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedod’s come to the farm last Friday. He made an interesting point that organic farmers do not grow winter beans, only spring beans, due to chocolate spot pressure. I had not realised this.
Some good news is that we have been successful with our ADOPT grant application. Simon Cowell is leading the project with Rothamsted, David Purdy and others involved. We are looking into the effects of long-term no till. We have seen a steady decline in yield and some strange in-field effects, and we want to investigate why. I have established autumn trial plots of no till vs Claydon, no till vs shallow cultivation, and with and without applied biology. At the moment, the Claydon looks the best; shallow cultivation, second; and no till, third. The biology is currently showing no effect. Harvest will be the ultimate judge. I have also taken various soil samples at various depths; these will be tested for nutrients, pesticide residue and anything else deemed relevant. I look forward to getting the results and trying to improve our farm system.
Other additions to the farm are some Cricket Bat Willow trees planted recently. We are working with a local company that makes bats, and my 11-year-old cricket-obsessed son is looking forward, in 12 years’ time, to maybe having a homegrown cricket bat!! We are also looking into growing wildflowers this autumn as a crop. A small farm like ours really needs to add value to our crops, and I see these niche crops as a way of doing this. Obviously, this does come with higher risk, but every crop seems high-risk at the moment and some with known dubious returns.
I wish you all good luck for the coming months. May the weather gods be kind.
