Is there ever a day in farming when you can say everything is exactly as it should be?

One of the irritants this spring is in a lovely crop of seed wheat that is following one field of beans and one of oilseed rape. It’s a new variety and just for these few days it’s possible to spot over the wheat about four plants per acre of headed out winter barley. The barley is clearly in the rows of wheat, and while it’s not a major job to hand rogue them, it still takes time to walk up and down every tramline and pull up the offending plant.

Elsewhere on the tillage front, we applied a selective herbicide to our crow-affected beans to control the charlock

While such contamination is difficult to avoid, I think that our Department seed inspection system is more thorough and rigorous than in some other countries.

Elsewhere on the tillage front, we applied a selective herbicide to our crow-affected beans to control the charlock which was taking advantage of the sparse bean population. Just how sparse is now very clear, with a section of the field with, I reckon, less than half the proper plant population per acre.

I am coming to the conclusion that if we are to stick with beans we will have to try and direct-drill them in the autumn

The rest of the crop seems fine. In cereals or oilseed rape, you could hope for extra tillering or branching, I am not optimistic that there is much capacity with beans to make up for the shortfall. We will have to wait for the harvest to really see. Meanwhile, I am coming to the conclusion that if we are to stick with beans we will have to try and direct-drill them in the autumn.

I was curious to find out how our biological slurry additive showed up when analysed. There is no doubt that the slurry treated with the additive was easier to agitate and definitely had a reduced smell. On the actual analysis side, because it came from the cattle on a finishing diet, the dry matter was 11.8% versus a more typical value of 6-7%. This high dry matter spilled over into a higher nutrient content, giving a slurry fertiliser per 1,000 gallons of €26 – a significant contribution towards reducing overall fertiliser costs. Ammoniacal nitrogen at 46% was not much lower than the normal range of 50-70%. Bur how much reduction is possible and with what effect? I don’t know.