How an Essex oat grower hit variable cost of £48.50/t
© GNP A focus on optimising crop inputs saw one Essex farmer spend just £48.50/t on variable growing costs for a crop of Mascani winter oats, the lowest in his benchmarking group.
Oats are a relatively cheap crop to grow with reduced nitrogen requirements, but Essex grower Harry Middleditch has managed to trim this further and scoop an award for the 2023 lowest variable costs.
Harry is a fourth-generation farmer at Hole Farm, managing 275ha of cereal crops on heavy Hanslope series clay soil. He runs a rotation of winter feed wheat, winter feed barley, spring malting barley and spring oats.
See also: Dorset grower hopes for lift from septoria-hitting SDHI
Milling oats are grown for the new Navara mill, the largest in Europe, and act as his main take-all break crop.
This year will see the addition of two Sustainable Farming Incentive options as break crops: winter bird food and a pollen and nectar mix, with the aim of putting fertility back into the soil.
Blackgrass is a challenge and the driving force of rotation decisions.
Double spring cropping has featured on the farm since 2012 and was introduced by Harry’s dad, who recalls it being “a horrendous season for blackgrass.”
However, Harry’s approach is all about getting a return on investment with data driven decisions. He does not do something simply because that’s the way it was done before.
“If the data backs it up, then we will do it. Our key driver is return on investment and optimising costs,” he says.
Harry’s cost-cutting success has been recognised by data analytics company Yagro, where he won the Best in Field Award for his 2023 harvest crop of Mascani oats.
Luke Sayer, Yagro’s content manager who runs the Best in Field Award, says Harry’s overall variable costs were £48.50/t, which is below the market median of £50.76/t.
© Tim Scrivener
Yagro data for Harry Middleditch’s winter oat variable costs |
||
|
|
2022 |
2023 |
|
Yield (t/ha) |
6.12 |
6.08 |
|
Seed (£/ha) |
64 |
48.75 |
|
Fertiliser (£/ha) |
166 |
139.50 |
|
Plant growth regulators (£/ha) |
13.39 |
25.03 |
|
Herbicide (£/ha) |
67.11 |
81.49 |
|
Total chemicals (£/ha) |
80.5 |
106.52 |
|
Total variable inputs (£/t) |
50.74 |
48.48 |
| Source: Yagro | ||
Spent less
Looking at the 2023 crop in detail, Harry managed to trim total variable costs from his 2022 spend, despite paying out more on some inputs.
Seed was 24% lower than the previous year as a result of using home-saved seed with no dressing.
Seed is grown on fields with lower weed burdens, and is tested for soil-borne disease.
Harry also reduced his fertiliser spend by 16% and cut bagged N fertiliser by 40kg/ha through the use of poultry manure from the farm’s 40,000-bird free range broiler business.
Navara Oat Milling
The new plant has the potential to process 280,000t of oats a year, drawing in grain from across central England.
The plant sits alongside an existing Camgrain store between Kettering and Corby in the heart of oat growing territory.
There are three joint venture partners – Camgrain, grain trading and agronomy group Frontier, and food and drink ingredients group Anglia Malting (Holdings) – and is known as Navara Oat Milling.
Spent more
However, there was a greater spend on plant growth regulators and herbicides in 2023, due to warmer spring temperatures which led to rapid growth that increased lodging risk.
“We needed to keep the crop standing to avoid yield losses and reduce combining issues, so PGR rates were upped to 0.2 litres/ha of trinexapac-ethylin two splits.”
There was a greater herbicide spend to reduce weed pressure for the following crop.
Excluding 30ha of low input crops in Countryside Stewardship, the bulk of the crop received a pre-drilling glyphosate followed by the post-emergence herbicide Eagle (amidosulfuron).
The Mascani oats were drilled at a seed rate of 400 seeds/sq m on 20 February, and the herbicide was applied on 28 February.
This year, Harry has switched to Isabel spring oats, as they offer more flexibility on drill date, than Mascani.
Virtual benchmarking group
As a member of one of Yagro’s virtual benchmarking groups, which pools data for members to compare with other businesses, Harry is driving his business forward.
“We look at the best performing crops in the group and see how they have achieved it. Is it seeds, micronutrition, etc,” says Harry.
An example of where Harry is benefiting from the group is by making better use of poultry manure.
By working with Leicestershire farmer Will Oliver, Harry has gained confidence to apply manure to standing crops in the spring, when conditions allow.
“We see it as an asset and are looking at how to utilise it more to reduce fertiliser use.”
In last year’s wheat crop, Harry applied 50kg/ha of foliar N, 50kg/ha of bagged nitrogen and the rest came from poultry manure.
This year, he is looking at 80kg/ha of bagged N and the rest poultry manure. So in total, he will cut back bagged fertiliser in wheat crops by 80-90kg/ha.
© Tim Scrivener
Yagro analytics
One Yagro feature that Harry Middleditch has benefited from is Field by Field, where farmers can assess field performance.
Harry uses the tool to assess cropping seasons and compare factors such as inputs, drill timings and production costs.
Once farmers know which fields aren’t performing, it’s a case of getting them back to the top.
“What we thought were our better performing fields didn’t deliver last year, so why is that?” asks Harry.
“We have done some drainage to improve soil conditions, as the existing system was getting past its lifetime. Hopefully, we will get the performance back.”
Another benefit is the Tracker feature that enables users to look at live gross margin figures for each field. “We can then see what is left of the margin as the season progresses, effectively monitoring spend as we go,” he says.
This has been a real help in making decisions on what to spend in what has been a difficult season, with backward crops and reduced yield potential.
Harry also used Yagro to produce baseline information on chemical spend and yield to give an idea of gross margins.
This enabled him to compare oats and beans with income from various Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) options.
Based on this data, he decided to drop beans and go with oats as the break crop, along with SFI winter bird food mix (£830/ha) and the pollen and nectar mix (£793/ha).
He plans to drill winter wheat after these SFI options, although he is targeting the lower weed burden fields to avoid any issues, as herbicides can’t be used on the SFI options.
Yagro is exibiting at Cereals 2024 and Harry Middleditch is one of the speakers at the “Efficiency is King” session of the Seed to Shelf Stage seminars, chaired by Yagros Luke Sayer.
