Farmer Focus: Trying a three-way winter wheat blend
© Tim Scrivener Harvest has finally been completed. It’s been a relatively smooth one, but has dragged on longer than it should have.
Results on the whole have been a little disappointing, with winter wheat yields only average, and let down further by poor spring crops and the overall cost to grow versus the current prices.
I wasn’t as impressed with Extase this year as I have been in previous years as it didn’t perform as well as Dawsum, Champion or Spotlight, so original plans for a larger area of it next year have been changed.
See also: How did harvest go for our Arable Insights farmers?
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There is a lot of interest in blending varieties at the moment, so I am planning on trying a small area of Extase, Dawsum and Champion, in the hope we benefit from Extase’s disease resistance, and mitigate the lower specific weight of the Champion.
It will be interesting to see how it matures, with Extase usually being much earlier than the other two.
Last year’s dry harvest, and concrete-like conditions, may have been good for harvest traffic, but they hampered or even stopped us being able to carry out any deeper cultivations in areas that needed it.
This has shown through this season with these areas lying wetter during spring and yielding poorly as a result.
This year, harvest traffic has easily inflicted compaction, but conditions have been good for remedial cultivations, and after a Monitor Farm meeting on soils last winter highlighted that there was more compaction present in some fields that I had realised, I have decided to undertake more subsoiling and cultivations than usual.
With low commodity prices, the margin for error is significantly less, and while direct-drilling and regenerative farming are a step in the right direction, targeted cultivations are still more reliable at present than a complete direct-drilling and cover crop system, based on the past few years’ experience on my farm.
My Countryside Stewardship application has been a constant headache, with an issue that required a call to the RPA every time I logged in to do something, only to then be put in a queue and told they would call back.
The call back always came at an inconvenient time, while miles away from the office with no computer or any of the information they required.
