How quickly planting time comes around again. Another year ahead to follow a financially challenging season. The temptation is to cut corners to help make ends meet but any such action must be weighed up carefully.

There are three things of particular importance to us in Ireland. Most growers are aware of the increasing grassweed burden to be tackled and also the increasing number of problem species. If you are lucky enough not to have problems such as wild oats, sterile brome, meadow brome, canary grass, blackgrass, etc, do all you can to keep them out. Certified seed is the best starting point as it operates zero tolerance through a higher voluntary standard for most of these grasses.

But these specific problems are not just a seed source issue. Machinery must also be watched as combines and balers can carry in seeds from a previous job. We are relatively lax in this regard but we can no longer afford to be. The appearance of blackgrass in fields that received spent mushroom compost in recent years opens a big question about the use of this organic matter source. When there was no blackgrass and when we only used Irish straw, there was no issue. But the fact that an amount of English straw is now being used to produce compost here means that this OM source is now a real risk.

A second big risk for the sector is the growing use of undressed grain as seed. There is always a level of risk with undressed seed but this increases several fold if seed is being home-saved from a crop that was not seed dressed to begin with. Thankfully, we have not seen bad seed-borne diseases for a number of decades, but they are potentially devastating and they can affect more than the untreated crop. Good basic husbandry must remain part of successful farming practice.

A third concern for us in Ireland is that we depend very much on international plant breeders to provide new varieties to keep us competitive. To ensure that this continues it is important that we play our part and pay royalties on all home-saved seed. This is the income source that funds new variety development and we must remain within that loop.

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