Opinion: Ergot may prompt a rethink
Mike Neaverson © Tim Scrivener Regular readers will know that I enjoy growing spring combinables about as much as I enjoy growing Maris Piper – the promise of such lucrative quality on paper, yet the consistent disappointment of such little reward in practice.
My disdain is historic and perhaps even genetic. Dad dabbled in most of the spring crops over the years, including many of the unusual ones.
Growing up, there were a few seasons when we grew cress quite successfully for seed, until everything that you could spray on it got banned and every insect in Lincolnshire started eating it.
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About the author
One of my first tractor jobs as a 13-year-old was ripping up an 87 acre field of failed borage. It was a Massey 3075 and 3.5m Maschio.
The Radio 1 chart show on a cassette. It’s funny how these things stick in your mind.
When I came home, I had a go, too, with some unusual spring crops, and in an exercise of the blind leading the blind, advised on some as well.
There is a company down south, specialist purveyor of the niche crop, that used to call me regularly asking whether I’d like to grow for them.
“You are nothing but persistent” I would jokingly answer the phone. “It was a ‘no’ on Tuesday and I’ve not changed my mind because it’s Friday.”
The fact is that niche crops are niche for a reason. Yields are catastrophically unpredictable and total failures common.
Weed problems in some of them can be epic. If it was lucrative, you wouldn’t need a marketing budget and a telesales team to get farmers to grow it.
That’s why, when all else fails, we usually revert back to spring wheat. Yes, yields can be poor. But at least it keeps your land clean and you can always sell it.
Who’s going to take your fancy herb seed when the only buyer in the world finds fault with it? It’s not, however, without its own problems.
Which leads me nicely onto ergot. It’s been a massive problem this year in many cereals, none more so than in spring wheat.
We got a claim for a load of Mulika the other day that made me spit out my cereal bar.
A mere £70/t deduction, of which half was for an abundance of ergot and the other half was for a scarcity of protein.
There is an enormous contradiction here in what the public, government and trade say they want – no soil disturbance, in-field weeds, loads of grass margins – versus what they are prepared to help mitigate the risk of.
Anywhere we ploughed instead of min-tilling or direct-drilling hardly had any ergot at all, and it was much worse around field boundaries.
I’m not saying that anyone should react to one particularly bad season by changing practices but, with ergot claims on winter wheat widely adding up to £150 – £300/ha on an already tight gross margin, another bad season may well see me shining up the mouldboards more widely for the ergot and splashing on more nitrogen for the protein. How very eco.
It would seem to me that the answer to this would be with colour-sorting capacity at mills, perhaps with the help of grant funding.
It would surely be more efficient to do this in dozens of mills rather than on the thousands of farms trying to do the best they can for both the environment and the bottom line.