Disappointment from winter barley harvest

A feeling of emptiness might best describe some growers’ experiences of winter barley in 2017 as many highly promising crops failed to deliver on their expected yield. Emptiness in the trailers was, in many cases, accompanied by a level of emptiness in the grains and this has been added to by the recent weakness in prices.

But before anyone judges this on winter barley alone, we must wait to see how other crops perform. We will hope for better, but only time will tell. History tells me that winter barley has been among the less-suited crops to prolonged hot spells, especially during grain fill.

The growing periods of all crops are driven by accumulated temperature, so untypical spells of hot temperatures accelerate crops’ development and this can result in earlier harvest if these temperatures continue. Many growers expressed alarm at the speed of maturity of the winter barley crop and since then the same might be said for all other crops also. But the consequences may not be the same.

My experiences of past years and past genetics was that crops like wheat and spring barley generally thrive in hot conditions. It might best be described as these crops having an in-built turbo-charger for growth so that when the heat does come to accelerate ripening they can grow more during the hot periods to give an added yield benefit during such years. But this depends on the crops being healthy and the soil and its fertility being able to feed these growth levels.

Cause of variability

Winter barley has been a different animal and it was always a wonder to me if modern genetics, with many recent high yields, have been able to turbo-charge its growth. Now that we have seen such a year, it is obvious that there have been many disappointments. But the question we must all ask is “Are these a result of the variety or the field”?

This is important because as far as I am aware, so far there does not seem to be a variety failure. Old seems as good as new and six-rows and hybrids have also suffered variability, but perhaps less so. And many growers have had both good and disappointing yields from the same variety, husbandry and weather.

If one had access to hundreds of field records, it is possible that one could attempt to unravel some of what happened in 2017. But speaking to researchers, some of the trial sites did suffer a considerable loss of fertile tillers during the dryness pinch in April and early May. This was as much as 20% in some instances.

One of the consultants told me this week that he counted 1,100 tillers per square metre last March and, following disappointing crop performance, he went back to count the stubble. In some instances, his stubble counts were down below 600 stems (ears)/m2 in two-row varieties.

This fall-off, or not, in tiller numbers might also go some of the way to explaining variable straw fields in 2017. Some fields had good straw yield while others were back by up to 20%. Is this tiller number only or is lighter straw a feature of the high levels of brackling evident?

So it would seem that growth pressure was quite real in the April/May period, at least in some crop situations. But there were still very many two-row crops with over 1,000 ears per square metre and six-row crops with over 600 ears per square metre and some of these still yielded both well and poorly.

One of the great challenges is to unravel the riddle of specific weight levels. I have heard of 4t crops of Cassia with specific weights of 64KPH and 3.5t/ac crops with 68-70KPH. There were even some six-row crops up to 67KPH. Generally high yields are reflected by high levels of grain fill, with good specific weights as a consequence. But when the high-yielding crop has a relatively low specific weight, one ends up with more questions than answers.

Could we have seen a year where low ear counts allowed some crops to fill to their potential or where very high ear counts restricted grain fill in all ears to produce lower-than-normal specific weight? One really needs thousand grain weights to draw any such conclusion and these will probably only come through research results in time.

There were some known problem crops where yield was hit. In general, foliar diseases were not a big factor but some crops possibly suffered from BYDV, while others appeared to suffer take-all. I am always a bit uncomfortable about apportioning total blame to these alone. Take-all will nearly always be worse in low fertility or where soil structure is poor. It is also an almost inevitable consequence of BYDV infection.

Is soil health an issue?

While this is certainly not a definitive comment, I must ask if soil structure and general soil health is a factor in the way field yields have panned out this harvest. There is no doubt that you could be lucky or unlucky with a shower and it could make or break a crop in a year like this one, but did fields that had been minded better suffer less and perform better in 2017?

Fields that had adequate fertility and kind, well-structured soil should be less affected by pinches of dryness. Was this the case in 2017?

In soft, slower-growth years, this might not be an issue but when the pace of growth is accelerated by higher temperatures, then all kinds of pressure points cut in as the daily demand for nutrients and water is increased considerably.

If this is a factor it points again to the need to look after soil, both in terms of its structure and its fertility. Application of organic matters help both structure and moisture retention over time.