The forecast for the immediate locality was good and it followed a few days of dry, breezy weather. We moved cattle out into a drawing pen and began agitating last week. Earlier, we had replaced a bearing in the pump, so on Friday 12 January, we began the 2018 season of slurry spreading.

With a four-wheel-drive tractor, fitted with wide tyres and a slurry tanker with low ground pressure wide tyres, I was amazed at the total absence of damage to the land. While we had to add some water, it was nothing like as much as had to be added when we use the umbilical system.

Difference

The crucial difference in my view is that the investment in internal farm roadways that we made over the last few years is paying off as the tanker and tractor can, in the main, go straight into each paddock from the hard core track and not go over and back along the same grooves.

The more slurry we can get out the better, from a fertiliser point of view, but it’s not going to be anything like enough to do the crops, apart from putting a few thousand gallons on the ground intended for the beans – assuming conditions are good enough. I have come to the conclusion that beans don’t do well in either compacted ground or when they are rushed in.

While we got just about 3t/acre last year from sowing the day before St Patrick’s Day, I was taken aback when a neighbour got a yield of 3.3t/acre having sowed a full week later. This goes against most of the normal thinking on the time for planting beans but it was an interesting example of ground conditions and fertility being more important than adherence to a strict sowing date.

Fertiliser programme

In the meantime, we now have to plan our fertiliser programme for the coming season.

As well as deciding on the fertiliser programme, we have to get up to speed with the prices. I bought most of the nitrogen last September – we missed the low price point that occurred in August, but have also avoided the recent sharp rise in prices.

Given our soil analysis we are going to have to put out 3.5cwt to 4cwt of 10.10.20 on most of the tillage ground. So far, I have got only one firm quote but we will have to make up our mind fairly soon.