Wheat varieties in a bearish market......Choices for 2014/15 season.

With winter barley yields proving to be consistent and high this season, questions about the cost of wheat production this season are rearing themselves daily. With on farm prices off the combine being touted at less than £120/ton, some serious head scratching is taking place in the south west as to what to plant this coming season.

What has been noticeable this season is the wet weather. Right from the outset, October through to May was wet and very mild, record storm surges, high winds, day after day with only a few days respite between storms to get the late planted crops in (after maize, potatoes). The early drilled fields got a flying start and where possible had to have a few sprays of insecticide to keep the aphids off. Seed dressed with Deter had enough protection early on, but this soon faded with the weather onslaught.

With wet mild weather, early ingress of disease was inevitable with Septoria levels in the early new year being high, along with a lot of yellow rust in susceptible varieties. With the ground being so wet and soils relatively warm, plants continued to produce biomass, but not much root as the soils were waterlogged. This continued all the way up till May when the rain abated and temperatures climbed. This was ideal conditions for maize establishment, but some wheats with small root systems started to show signs of strain.

The very mild and wet winter has had another significant effect on winter barley and wheat, namely Take-All. In Lattitude seed treated crops, drilled in early October, there still has been crop damage, that drilled in late September is worse, particularly in fields that weren't rolled post drilling. I have seen Take-All effects in winter barley as bad as in wheat, even barley drilled late October down in Cornwall. In some wheat crops that were drilled as second wheats early (late September) through into the middle of October, it is possible to see which are the early drilled and those that went in last, purely by the degree of Take-All infection in the fields. In other instances, over-yeared seed from 2012 that only had single purpose dressing, was planted in fields following spring barley, purely due to the results of cropping rotation mayhem in 2012, with disastrous results being seen now. I have seen instances of Take-All symptoms in winter barley following winter oats following wheat too, some a complete right-off.

This year, the two cereal demonstration sites were drilled at quite different times, the site at Bude went in early, 25th September, into ideal seedbed conditions. Some varieties have two plots looking at over-yeared seed, a product of the very wet autumn of 2012 when a lot of seed never got planted. Given the issues of 2012, it is hardly surprising that farmers were keen to get the winter crops in early in 2013 to avoid the same issues again. The Tregony site however was opposite, originally planned to go in October, weeks went by with conditions hopeless, until a little window opened the last week of November that allowed the plots to be sown 2nd December. The mild weather definitely helped this lot survive, although some varieties were really up against it and those plots looked appallingly thin. This field was sprayed with Multimax at the earliest opportunity (phosphite and potash foliar feed) to stimulate root and shoot development, which had the desired effect and thickened the plots up well.

Tregony demonstration site mid July.

Bude demonstration site 23rd May with untreated area showing yellow rust in susceptible varieties.

Winter Barley plots at Tregony, Matros in foreground, then Harlequin, Cadillac, California. Matros in rest of field. This field followed winter wheat and suffered some Take-All effects.

In the previous years (2012 and 2013) Avatar winter wheat has been the top yielding variety at both sites, in early and late drilling slots, wet year and dry year. A son of Istabraq and the top perfuming variety in Ireland and Scotland, it has proved itself as a big yielder in this maritime climate of the south west. A variety that was half a percentage point off going on the HGCA recommended list in 2012, it is a very reliable and farmer friendly variety. In trials at Exeter going back to 2008, it has always been in the top 5 in terms of outright performance and across a wide range of sites in the HGCA trials system it performed well. It was the variety that caught my eye back in 2009 at Exeter, I started including it in farm trials in 2010 and it has proven a very consistent and forgiving variety. planted early, it doesn't get too proud and full of disease like Istabraq can (thats why its always advised to plant Istabraq late down here, possibly the best wheat variety after maize), planted late (end of February, it has amazing tillering capacity and a fantastic yield potential. I have a case of it being planted the 19th of March this year and it has flowered and produced a great crop. That is nearly as forgiving as Claire! Due to it's high tillering capacity, it lends itself to the Claydon system of minimum tillage, as can be seen below.

Avatar drilled in November with a Claydon drill, near Crediton.

Avatar in a field thats been continuous wheat for 30 years, looking fabulous. Drilled at 230 seeds/sqm in late mid September 2013.

Avatar produces a good bright sample with a high specific weight.

Since starting this we have now harvested about 400acs of wheats, predominantly Istabraq and Avatar. Yields for Istabraq are in the 3.75t/ac range with a good specific weight, with Avatar in second wheat/continuos wheat slots doing the same and between 3.8 and 4.25t/ac in the 1st wheat slots, again with very good specific weights. There are are a few results that I am waiting on from the Crediton and Truro areas, but at the minute yields are promising for a difficult year.

I am hoping we will have the trial plots harvested in the near future which will then give us an indication of where the new varieties like Zulu, Panacea, Evolution and Revelation sit in the mix. Revelation does look promising at the minute, Panacea may surprise with its yield too.

More to follow soon.

Interesting articles recently in the press.

Two landmark publications came out this last week (7th May), the fist being an article published by NASA on their predictions for global rainfall patterns in the future.The report highlights the correlations between increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the level of rainfall across all regions of the planet.If you are farming, I thoroughly recommend that you look at this as it is going to determine what and where we grow food, in particular Brazil, Southern Africa, Northern Australia and all countries around the Mediterranean.

The article can be found here:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/may/HQ_13-119_Rainfall_Response.html

The second article of note this week was the report that Carbon Dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere had reached the symbolic figure of 400ppm, the last recorded time this level had been reached previously was 3-5 million years ago. Now on its own, this probably doesn't register to highly on the radar, however a week earlier there was another related article pointing to the fact the increasing CO2 was leading to a more acid Artic Ocean and changing the way ice and currents flow, indeed there are suggestions that polar low pressure systems are becoming more frequent as a result which in turn is causing the erratic flow of the jetstream which in turn is influencing the weather in the northern hemisphere.

This article can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22486153 whilst the article on polar lows is here: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/linking_weird_weather_to_rapid_warming_of_the_arctic/2501/

It seems that as farmers, we are going to be trying to produce food in ever changing and more erratic weather patterns as time goes on, which is going to make an event like 2012 more likely in future. In which case, we need to become better adapted to producing food in these scenarios, as the current financial risk vs reward ratio is unsustainable in its current guise of large corporates profiteering excessively in relation to the primary producers.

Weather issues!

Well most of us have and are having to deal with weather issues, most likely for the next 18 months as the after effects of this years weather ease their way through the next cropping year. What do I mean by this, well it matters little what crop you are growing, whether grass or arable, compaction and subsoil damage from stock and machinery will have been considerable this year and these are very noticeable in autumn sown crops already this year and will be evident in grass growth rates in the spring.

About 40% of autumn crops are in the ground down here in the Southwest, a large amount of grass reseeding never got done because the ground conditions were poor too and any Oilseed Rape that was drilled has sustained a prolonged spell of attack from slugs and what is left is now being piled into by pigeons en masse!

To top it all, spring cereal options are now difficult with the chronic lack of spring cereal seed available.  I am not panicking yet as I think there will be seed coming available after new year that has been ordered on the proviso the wheat that was planned is not drilled. I know a lot will say that because the ground is now so wet, there is no chance in hell of it being dry enough to drill by the beginning of February. I remember clearly the statements earlier in 2012 about it taking years to recover the subsurface moisture deficits in much of England due the extreme drought conditions, look where we are now 7 months down the track. If we get this very cold weather that some forecasters are predicting, winter ploughing and late drilling winter wheat is still an option, especially any varieties with Claire in their parentage. Last year we were drilling Istabraq on ground at 800ft on the 1st of March and it still yielded more than all the earlier drilled stuff.

So don't panic, there is time yet still to get winter wheat in the ground, we still have a lot of weather to go through before spring and hopefully that which is planted will have a deep enough root system to survive while the cold weather kills off the slug problem and does something to remedy the soil structure issues. Just remember to raise the drilling rates up towards the 450 seeds/sqm level to account for higher seed mortality and reduced tiller numbers and don't drill too deep!

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.

Playing Russian Roulette

For a fortunate few, Harvest 2012 is drawing to a protracted and very difficult close, certainly this is a year that we aren't going to forget in a hurry!

It has been a revelation this year, a 'shake out' year as one of our breeders described it, as some serious issues that potentially threaten wheat breeding program's are starting to emerge with some very serious consequences for UK farming.

In the past some breeding program's have focused on genetic resistance to regular disease pressures, septoria tritici being the main one, with other traits being bolted on. Some other breeders have been focusing on all out yield, regardless of how genetically strong these varieties were, their consensus being that disease risk could be managed by chemistry tailored to curb disease outbreaks. Barn filling varieties with poor to average disease traits proliferated as farmers bought into the idea that chemistry could solve all disease problems. As with anything in nature, disease pressures and mutations give rise to new challenges. Single gene resistance to disease instead of dual, or multiple gene resistance is easier to breed into new varieties and allows quick turn around from lab to field. As a consequence we are now seeing multiple incidences of varieties succumbing  to Yellow Rust and Brown Rust strains that are evolving, varieties that have only just been registered on the HGCA recommended lists, with the resultant increase in usage of full blown ag-chem programs to try and control these issues.

Throw into this mix one of the wettest growing seasons, especially from pre flowering all the way to harvest with low solar energy levels, high humidity and very damp soil conditions and you have a perfect storm scenario for a whole host of new diseases to make their presence felt too, especially Fusarium which has quite literally sucked all yield out of wheats this year, apart from those like Istabraq that has not suffered as much and is still producing a reasonable sample.

A common theme I am hearing on farm is a new level of questioning with regard to ag-chem inputs, how expensive this last season has been to get a crop that basically isn't near covering costs. It's is interesting to note how some of these chemistry suppliers have gone from small scale operations to giants in the industry in a very short period of time, considering how long the 'green revolution' in agriculture has been going on for. In a very short time span, farmers have seen their supply base of agricultural chemicals diminish considerably down to just a handful of players in the market, with the agronomy angle reduced even further and geared almost exclusively to structured spray programs. In a wet year like this last one, total reliance on sprays to control disease has been severely tested and the basic fundamentals of genetic resistance and a variety's ability to cope under stress have been fully on display. Some have coped and a lot have not.

Soil science, I would say is one of the most important factors governing yield, has been largely forgotten, farmers have devolved responsibility in many areas to their ag-chem supplier and crop walkers who supposedly are more knowledgeable in maximising yields and thus returns on their behalf. The knowledge gap on farm has been further diminished as a result of squeezed margins in the 'naughties' that lead to farmers farming more acres with less personnel and thus being more time restricted to chase knowledge in this regard. Universities and Agricultural Colleges too reduced the soil science input and concentrated more on the chemistry and machinery aspects of tillage, horsepower and technology as soil science generally was considered boring by most students. How many modern day farmers really understand and know what is going on in their soils?

A common theme I hear on farm is this; "why is it that with all your new fancy varieties you are breeding I am still only getting the yields we were getting 10 years ago"? Well, this time I heard an answer that came from a soil specialist company that has been growing a database on soils across the UK for the last 10 plus years and what he said was scary. The basis of it is this, pure arable farmers have been depleting the soil organic matter for so long with simple cereal and rape rotations that in some areas these levels are so low as to be irreplaceable, the soils have had all the life sucked out of them and as a result they physically are unable to provide the growing crops with the nutrients to attain their genetic potential.

It really has been noticeable in fields this year, those with good organic matter, good structure, good nutrient status have still delivered a reasonable yield and machinery has still been able to travel at critical times without leaving 3ft deep ruts. A farmer I know in Wiltshire has been chopping his straw for 10 years now, been applying copious amounts of compost and maintaining his lime and nutrient status with almost religious zeal. On very heavy clay over chalk, he has managed to keep going during harvest when his neighbours were getting stuck, his fields have a natural 'sponginess' to them as you walk them with very few areas of standing water in any of them, whilst neighbours have had 6" across whole fields of standing water for long periods of time. When you look where the combine has been traveling, there are no deep ruts, look over the hedge and it looks like a battlefield.

The genetic potential of some of the older wheat varieties like Einstein is well in excess of 25t/ha, we know from data attained in New Zealand these varieties are currently doing 18t/ha on farm in places consistently where the fertility of the soils has been maintained and the soils well managed in terms of rotation, organic manure levels, trace element replacement and most importantly, soil structure. These farmers have good rotations with break crops designed to replace organic matter and recharge the soil nutrient levels, instead of relying on stuff out of a bag. UK farmers in the main have not been doing this and yield increases have largely flatlined.

We need a radicle rethink in how we manage crop rotations, increase soil organic matter levels, improve soil structure and rejuvinate trace element levels. We need to sometimes stop and think; the soils we are farming are the product of millions of years in the making, yet with our modern cropping methods we are depleting their ability to produce the very food that our growing populations will need in the future.

How are the future generations of young farmers going to produce a decent crop that provides an economic return if the very medium needed to grow it is barren? Those who think GM will gallantly ride to the rescue are sadly going to be disappointed because the focus in GM at present is geared towards mainly chemistry, rather than soils.

The last 5 years have in the main been benign to cereal varieties, yes there has been pressure from disease, but the weaker ones were still able to deliver a credible yield with a lot of ag-chem help. This year we hit chamber six and it has blown a huge hole in many a bottom line  Lets hope this year the HGCA clamps down on low disease threshold varieties whose presence on the list now is very questionable and we move away from 'spray and weigh' varieties.

A little glimmer of light amongst a tale of woe.

Speak to many westcountry farmers and the opinion is the same, we have never seen a 'summer' like this one, in fact the whole year has been pretty much up the spout with no let up in difficult conditions.

With harvest struggling on and the results looking far from brilliant so far, it is great to hear a success story, well success in part anyway. A while ago I put a short clip up on youtube where our Sales Director Alastair Moore and I were looking at the ins and outs of establishing Oilseed rape, the link to the clip is down below. Our Rape breeder has been saying for years that canopy management, establishment and nitrogen influence final yields much more so than the individual variety that are ranked on the HGCA 'descriptive' list (I call it descriptive, because some of the LSD numbers are so far out so as to make the results statistically null and void). We get shoehorned into chosing varieties according to their results on this list, which incidently through the way the data is gathered is automatically selecting for taller and later maturing varieties, not ideal given the conditions this year!

Last summer a variety called Artoga, bred by Limagrain, started to raise it's profile because it was doing stunningly well in large parts of Europe and was one of only a few varieties that proved it could survive bitterly cold conditions and produce a crop that doesn't readily shatter at harvest time. I persuaded a few of my customers to try it and lo and behold it does what it says on the can! One of my customers on really wet heavy and very marginal soils on the cornish border put some in with a Sumo, very late (late September) and although we had a mild autumn, the fact we had so much rain drowned quite a bit of it where water pooled and sat from November through till March. However, on the one field that is south facing and reasonably well drained it was stonkingly good. Considering as well that it didn't have an autumn herbicide, that it only had one fungicide spray during it whole lifetime, to end up with an average yield well over 1ton/ac is encouraging, given that some crops that have had everything thrown at them are only doing 1.5t/ac. To appreciate how much abuse it had, it was dessicated and then left a good 3 weeks enduring torrential rain and thunderstorms, with long spells and damp mizzle thrown in as well, followed by bursts of very steamy hot weather before the combine managed to get to it last weekend (11th August). The grower fearing the worst gingerly started cutting thinking that most of the seed would have dropped out, or worse would start shedding from the vibration of the cutter bar on the combine. I am happy to report his worries were unfounded; no lodging, no cutterbar losses, no shedding! 

Elsewhere we are seeing yields consinstently in the 1.55-1.8t/ac range down here, which given the conditions and the season is quite encouraging and certainly on a par or exceeding the yields of the high ranking varieties on the HGCA list. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsNHjSykIwM&list=UUCuUvslFtDuEj6bQPEOHIxA&index=4&feature=plcp