The importance of upholding soil health and sustaining its productivity for the future is essential. Cover crops can prove an effective means of contributing to soil health and quality when incorporated into a rotation.
Selecting a variety for autumn sowing begins with evaluating your current variety within your specific farming system. Additionally, it's important to consider any new varieties available on the market, including a few new options this autumn.
Seen firstly as a good alternative break crop to oilseed rape – which has become harder to establish due to the difficulties in controlling flea beetle – maize is now a valuable forage for their beef finishing enterprise as well as an additional cash crop sold to neighbouring dairy and goat farms.
Autumn 2023 was a difficult one for many, with the only real drilling window way back in September we have seen a deluge of rain since which seems to have no end in sight, with forecasts predicting wet weather into the new year. This has meant only a handful of opportunities to get on the land to cultivate and then sow autumn crops.
As we start to look to what 2024 will bring, it’s a natural instinct to turn to spring cereals for any land that didn’t get planted in the autumn - deliberately or otherwise! However, with shortages of spring cereals it’s now more important than ever to remember that autumn cereals can be sown successfully into the new year. So, here are my top tips for late sowing winter wheat!
When growing high yielding varieties, often other agronomic features such as disease resistance are sometimes overlooked. The fungicides at our disposal today are capable of producing extremely good results, but it is important to apply as much thought to the fungicide programme and timings as to the choice of product, to achieve optimum yield potential.
Over recent years, the emphasis has moved away from reactive fungicide applications to treat visible disease in the crop, and more towards a strategy where prevention is better than cure. To achieve this, the fungicides must be applied at the correct time and early in the development of the disease, or even before infection occurs, with timing infl uenced by growth stage, weather and the variety’s disease resistance.
While harvest 2024 may seem like a long time away, choosing the best variety for your farm this autumn is the first step to ensuring it’s a successful one. Wynnstay’s extensive autumn seed portfolio will cover any needs you have enabling able to choose the best variety. In this article, I have outlined key varieties for the upcoming autumn in my “ones to watch”.
Know what soil reserves you have in the ground, get your fertiliser on early and use little and often applications, is the advice CF Fertilisers' arable agronomist Allison Grundy has for growers planning spring crops.
Widely grown in northern Europe, hybrid rye is proving to be an increasingly popular choice for improving the performance of AD (Anaerobic Digestion) plants and now as a high yielding wholecrop for livestock production.
With its huge yield potential, flexible drilling dates, vigorous growth habit and very early maturity, it provides growers with the opportunity for increased flexibility, in terms of the position of energy crops in their rotation.
The 2021/22 AHDB Recommended List sees several high yielding varieties introduced in the wheat and barley groups. For maximum potential yield to be achieved, crops need to be provided with the correct balance of essential nutrients throughout the growing season.
Improving Nitrogen fertiliser Use Efficiency (NfUE) will be one of the most important ways in which UK growers can improve their business productivity in the future.
The single most important decision you can make to maximise your NfUE lies in the type of fertiliser you choose in the first place, says CF Fertilisers’ head agronomy Dr. Sajjad Awan. Whilst good management can help finetune the effectiveness of your applications, start with the wrong Nitrogen source and you’ll be locked into lower levels of NfUE with little you can do to lift it, he says.
“NfUE is essentially a measure of how much of the Nitrogen applied ends up in the crop. “In simple terms, if you apply 100kg N/ha and only 50kg N/ha is taken up by your crop, you will have an NfUE of 50% and half of the N you have paid for has gone somewhere other than into your crops as intended “Improving NfUE benefits your crop, your pocket and the wider environment.
Whether you are looking at it from the perspective of clean air, reducing your carbon footprint or increasing production efficiency, loss of N from the cropping system is a major problem.”
