FEATURE
FARMER FOCUS
ANDREW JACKSON Harvest has come and gone. Yields were good but could have been better had the growing season not been so variable. We had trimmed our Nitrogen rates to 160 Kg/N/Ha for wheat and OSR, but huge swings of yields within the fields told me that the yield had not been altogether determined by the fertiliser rate but more by the soil type. Harvest has come and gone. Yields were good but could have been better had the growing season not been so variable. We had trimmed our Nitrogen rates to 160 Kg/N/ Ha for wheat and OSR, but huge swings of yields within the fields told me that the yield had not been altogether determined by the fertiliser rate but more by the soil type. This autumn our OSR has been drilled mostly with the Horizon drill, which means no leading leg to loosen the soil, most farmers place the seed behind a subsoiler leg, because OSR can be a lazy rooter, so I am a little out of my comfort zone and we will have to wait and see. The rate of DAP has also been dropped to reflect a nitrogen application of 15Kg/N/Ha. The results from the Horizon drill have been pleasing. We have succeeded in uniformly sowing, four millimetres deep
Mixing Johnson Su
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for quinoa and grass seed and twenty to thirty millimetres deep for wheat and meadowfoam. Although a small company, I feel that if you are looking for a no-till disc drill, I would recommend the Horizon along with demonstrations of the more established drill manufacturers. As we look to the future and the threat of losing glyphosate, my thoughts are that maybe the drill manufacturer should sell inter-row guided weeders which are compatible with the drill sizes and coulter widths. This may be blue sky thinking but the Chameleon drill has already gone through this thought process. After exploring the options of mixing a Johnson Su compost extract with “out of the grain store “wheat seed, I stumbled across an Agritrend concrete mixer bucket. I mentioned in my previous article about the Haggerty’s in Australia were using a grain auger to blend the liquid extract with the seed, however for some reason or other I thought that I would go with the concrete mixer bucket and if all else failed at least I would be able to mix reasonable volume of concrete. The cost of the bucket was more than most would want to pay, but I am pleased to report that Anna and I successfully mixed or blended ten litres of liquid with half a tonne of seed, we then opened the chute at the bottom of the bucket and let the bucket sweep the seed into the drill. This was a batch operation, and four batches filled the drill. The seed flowed well through the metering devices and has emerged evenly, will it make a yield difference? Watch this space. David White kindly alerted me to Michael Horsch’s Christmas Fireside chat on YouTube. It was an enjoyable video and at one point Michael discussed making compost in Bavaria using a blend of green chopped cover crop together with chopped straw, the idea being that the straw might turn to some sort of biochar within the compost. The compost would be anaerobic and therefore did not require turning, this appealed to the lazy part of my nature. My brain engaged gear, I did not have access to chopped cover crop, but I did have an aftermath of grass after the grass seed had been harvested (with a stripper header), as well as access to straw. The other benefit would be keeping the straw and grass in the loop of the farm, also avoiding buying in any contaminated compost. I eventually contacted Michael Horsch to learn a little more about the process, to my astonishment, I got an email from the man himself. I was almost as exciting as receiving an email from the Queen. Michael explained that the constituents were roughly 50:50 and pointed me towards work that had been carried out by Walter Witte from East Germany. Much of the Walter Witte work was in German but I gleaned that volcanic rock dust was also added, the sides of the clamp should be consolidated, and the height of the www.directdriller.co.uk 19
