Final post , harvest home

Well this is the final post for this blog , we finished harvest and it yielded 2t/acre or 5t/ha of spring red wheat and it has been sold for a big premium, so highly profitable.

I have learnt many things over the 2 year period we have run this trial, mostly what you can do with a little over a short period , but we now have the field back into its rotation and it will now run in conjunction with the nearby block.

I strongly believe that the future of agriculture lies in the nutritional side and to be honest the next step would to convert a whole block to this programme , however i dont have the time or possibly the balls to do, this so i will revert back to a comfortable status quo, using "conventional chemistry " but more nutrtion,.

To be honest i really ought to the whole hog and go organic , but..........thats another story. Its a really big itch , but will i make money?

Thankyou for reading this over the 2 years if i start another blog i will post alink yours
Mark

Getting over scorch

Well as you can see the ears are emerging well.It didnt help when we managed to scorch the crop with liquid N applied as a foliar we did this twice with straight UAN . You would have thought we would of learnt the first time.
There is some clover growing underneath but not enough to contribute anything next year.
Application wise , we have sprayed small ammounts of fungicide, growth regulator and phosphite and masses of magnesium,manganese.
Total N use will be approx 150 kg/N /ha.
Having visited the Cereals show, we will be changing our ways next season, the plan is split another field in 2 and spray one half conventionally with fungicides and one half with just nutrients and microbes.
So the Small Tustins experiment or whatever it is will end this summer and it will go back to a conventional system.The reason being is that to farm biologically you have to change your entire farming system , it takes time and effort , but above all it relies on long term change. The way we farm is very short term (apart from the land we own) because we have no long term tenancies , in other words we need a return from monies invested in a period of no longer than 2 years.So we need to apply foliar products and place products with seed that only that growing crop needs now these products can be from the "biological stable". But long term change of soil structure using expensive composts etc is not .(compost tea any one)
I have some ideas brewing (no pun intended) and will start another blog next year.

However I will continue to take photos and let you know about harvest .

Thank you for following this blog .
Mark

Todays photos

These are the latest pictures of the spring wheat.

following week

Quick update

Here are some photos taken a couple of weeks ago , will get some later ones soon,
The field ha received a further 40 kg of N as liquid foliar applied with a product called LessN.

It has also been sprayed for Charlock and has a fungicide , growth reg , and magnesium and manganese .

The clover doesnt seem to be growing , mind you its only had one rain, 20mm.

Emergence of wheat

Its up, it roared out of the ground 10 days ago and keeps going , its had its first dose of N 80kg N/ha.
we need to find a source of humic granules in the UK ,

Drilling wheat and clover.

Last Wednesday we sprayed off the oats ( which had been hammered by the cold winter) , the black grass which seemed to have come from no where and all the other odd weeds that were growing quite merrily.
The next question is what to do? do we cultivate or attempt to direct drill. We chose the latter and used our Weaving tine drill .
For the direct drill purist this isnt strictly direct drilling as we had moved the soil in the autumn when we had drilled the oats but it worked so thats fine.
We drilled on Thursday 24th March (after subsoiling the tramlines ). with 180 kg/ha of ACBarrie spring red wheat , which will be grown on contract for Gleadells on their RHM contract for UK bread .
According to the great and good this wheat gets full of disease, grows very tall, gets more disease and then falls over ,and doesnt yield and we want to try and grow it with less fungicides. Oh well we`ll see.
After drilling we rolled it in , with 12m rolls.
The following day we spread on 10kg/ha of red clover(we are giving theclover thing another go) with the quad bike , which was very easy and then rolled it in at angle to the previous days rolling .
We now wait for rain .
PS it rained today .