Maize thoughts

I know a lot of maize growers this year are probably thinking about whether it is the crop they should be growing, or thinking about reducing their acreage grown, or thinking why they decided to grow it in the first place. Yes it has been a really difficult year for maize growers, certainly down here in the south west, but then looking at wheat whole crop results and seeing starch levels down as low as 12%, you question the wisdom of relying on this as a starch source too. The same rules that apply to getting a good crop of wheat apply to growing a good crop of maize, namely good seedbeds, the right fertility, the right field aspect and a whole lot of SUNSHINE! Without the later, nothing grows, as can be seen with grass growth as well this year.

The vital thing now when looking at harvesting maize is to make sure the crop is as fit as possible before going into the clamp, cutting maize below 20% DM is really asking for a lot of trouble when it comes to be fed, the acid loading from the sap and sugars that convert into acid during the fermentation process will be off the richter scale, making for some very unhappy animals that are forced to eat it. Not to mention the potential environmental concerns of trying to control and store, dispose of all the effluent that is likely to pour out the bottom of the clamp.

A crop that has been re-drilled, showing the most yellow cob with the most starch, though only at about 20%DM.  The re-drilled stuff has a long way to go before it's ready to be ensiled.

A really good crop of maize (for this year), but at least 10 days away from being ready to cut. Taking this early will decimate all the hard work and add to the woes of trying to feed it successfully this coming winter.

This crop was at 30% DM, can see the die back in the plants, the sheaves on the cobs have started to brown off and the grains were firm with little milk in them. It may only be an 8 ton crop, but at least all of it will be utilisable. The cows will milk better off this than the crop above if ensiled at this stage.

It's despairing when you see fields as wet as this, this late in the year, the temptation is so strong to go and get the crop on a dryish day, but patience will give a better result.

 Maize under plastic this year seems to have been very variable, it certainly isn't the magic bullet to growing good maize, some very early drilled stuff rotted under the sheets, other stuff never got going as the soil temperatures were too low for adequate mineralisation of nutrients to take place. Those that planted late April and into May however did get some reasonable crops, however due to the low levels of sunlight, they have faced a nightmare trying to cut the crops without dragging up big pieces of plastic into the foragers as there hasn't been enough sunlight for it all to break down.

There are some things we can do however to improve the agronomy aspect of growing maize here in this part of the world. The issue is we have to get contractors and growers likewise to take it forward, as  contractors are heavily invested in the status quo at present.

Inter-row cultivation with something like this in the picture link below is what I have used very successfully in Zimbabwe in a pre-post-emergence herbicide application situation up to about 6 leaf stage. It is very useful where the soil has capped off after a heavy downpour and the soil has slumped a bit, destroys any young weeds, aerates the soil and can be configured to through the soil towards the plants, or into the middle of the row. It works tremendously well in combination with a post emergence fertiliser application as you can 'brush' the nitrogen in towards the roots, making the uptake and utilisation far better. The other beauty of these machines is they are light and don't require a lot of horsepower (and weight) to pull them.
http://www.oliverdahlman.com/sitebuilder/images/p114-600x289.jpg

Strip tillage / Rip-on-row tillage is another way we can get maize established, a very well documented and proven form of growing maize in both the southern hemisphere as well as the USA is slowly making an appearance here in the UK, but the machinery looks really expensive and requires a lot of horsepower to pull. There are simpler and less costly manufacturers about.
http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Strip_till_improves_nutrient_uptake_and_yield_999.html

We also need to look at these types of planters to maximise sunlight availability per plant, whilst maximising nutrient uptake too. I saw one of these in the Freestate last December and the maize planted this way was noticeable healthier, further forward with thicker stems than that drilled conventionally. The farmer reckoned he was seeing a least a 10% grain yield advantage, in some cases up to 20% or more. I know Great-plains (Simba) have a machine here in UK, they have done some work with it this year, but I haven't yet been able to see how well it went. The link below is the machine I saw.
http://www.carrotech.co.za/twin-row/a-monosem-6x2-twin-row-planter-sold-in-mpumalanga-408

All food for thought.

Wheat Demo Plots 2012

The two sites, one at Tregony and the other at Bude had very contrasting starts this last season.

Tregony followed Winter Oats and was drilled by the 10th October in relatively good conditions at a seed rate of 64kg/ac (158kg/Ha) and had a good start with the mild and albeit wet conditions through till Christmas. Bude on the other hand followed grain maize in part of an oilseed rape field, which came off mid October. However, the heavens then opened and the stova on the surface acted as a lovely mulch retaining all this moisture. The situation was worsened by the fact that a Simba cultipress had disced the stalks just after cutting with the result the land became like a sponge and nothing could move on it till we got a lucky break mid November when we managed to get a plough in and sowed the plots right behind using a light tractor with a 3m triple K type cultivator and air drill. Even so, there were wet areas where we had to lift the implement out of the ground almost in order to get through without getting stuck.

The above photo shows the thin looking Stigg (more brown than green) with JB Diego (New seed) on the left of the dividing strip and farm-saved JB Diego on the right. Ignore the very green headland which is Nickerson Original Invicta seed, look closely at the establishment of the JB Diego. The new seed has established far better with a denser plant number, is more vigorous in its growth at this early stage, something that would continue right through the plots lifespan.

Edgar, a new variety bred by Limagrain in Germany and a useful Group 1 milling variety was in the demo to see how well it might fair down in wet and wild Cornwall. It was the greenest all through winter, well established and very clean. It has a disease rating similar to Alchemy with similar yield. It is the very dark green plot, with Solstice on it's left and Exsept on it's right and Crusoe, a new group 1 in the foreground. The photo below shows the difference between Invicta and Alchemy coming through the winter, Invicta had much more biomass and leaf area, Alchemy much more prone and prostrate.

The three plots visible below are left to right Istabraq (low vigour seed and looking thin), Gravitas and Horatio to right of the central divide and Avatar below it. Gravitas had a low Thousand Grain Weight TGW, so looks very thick, Horatio looked well and green through out the winter. Avatar is just visible to the right of the Horatio.

The Bude plots by contrast looked quite rough given the way it was mauled in.

The late planting proves that sowing low vigour seed is not a good idea! It was a struggle to do plant counts in the Istabraq plot, Stigg also was not looking happy, so can safely say this is not a variety to drill late!

However, by the end of March they had started to pull together remarkably well. The Edgar still looking very green compared to all the rest as can be seen below.

By May, the Istabraq plot that had looked bare looked like this, a transformation, as it tillered like mad with some plants having 20 plus tillers. This was really surprising as this would have been ploughed in in normal circumstances to establish a spring crop.

By May, the Edgar was showing just what a huge plant relative to everything else it is, very noticeable with the thick wide chord leaves. This photo I took up at Bury St Edmunds shows this clearly.

I held two open days this year at both venues, the main ones being the 5th and 12th of July, first at Bude, then Tregony. The Bude day was well attended with 60 people attending during the course of the day to look at the Wheat and Oilseed Rape plots. Alastair Moore, Nickerson Sales Director was in attendance and gave everyone a frank and well appreciated appraisal of what was happening with the varieties, as well as in the wider grain areas to the north. It was really useful having a large scale cereal growers' perspective on the risk versus reward of varieties, how spray costs this year were making such a dent in farm budgets and what the wet weather was doing to potential yield estimates. 

Finally, on the last day of August, we managed to harvest/salvage the wheat plots at Bude, with the ones at Tregony done a week later. Here are the videos of both demo plots just prior to them being cut, this gives you a fairly accurate idea of how well these varieties stood up to this years conditions.

I am trying to get the results into a format I can post on here, so far it is not like excel or pdf files!