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The current Teagasc BETTER farm crops programme aims to demonstrate key areas of precision farming across three host farms – John Collins in Waterford, Kevin Nolan in Carlow and Derek Keeling in Dublin. While the focus on precision farming is often on high-tech equipment, the programme also demonstrates that some lower-tech tools can be just as important for precision farming.
Accurate record keeping, nutrient planning and the ability to recognise key growth stages are all vital for good crop husbandry. Each of the farms will host an open day in June to demonstrate how they use technology to assist their farming practices. The theme for this year’s events is: “Precision applications of inputs.”
Farm walks will take place on these farms on the dates shown in Table 1. All walks will begin at 2.00pm.
After the difficult spring, John now has his crops more or less up to date and the gate is closed on oilseed rape and winter barley. The final fungicide application on winter barley was applied at the “paintbrush” stage as the awns were emerging. In general, the winter barley was very clean from a disease point of view.
Winter wheat fungicides were applied at final-leaf-three fully emerged and flag leaf fully emerged. Ground conditions were not ideal for the earlier applications so John left the normal wheels on the tractor to reduce rutting in the tramlines. The wheat is now booting so the final head spray fungicide will probably be due next week.
The spring oats crop is now at GS30/31 and has received its first fungicide and trace elements. It also received herbicide and aphicide at the three-to-four-leaf stage, just before tillering – the most effective timing for aphid control. The headlands were sown a week later than the field but they are catching up fast.
John took delivery of a new sprayer this spring and it has proven, so far, to be a great addition. It is fully GPS enabled, has a steering axle, section control (11 sections) and auto boom height control. The auto boom height control has been particularly useful this year as tramlines are more rutted than normal.
Teagasc has also measured John’s tramline widths and found that they are, on average, within 30cm of the 27m desired. This equates to approximately 1.5cm on each side of the drill per pass with his 3-metre drill – not bad going. John takes great care setting up the drill to make sure that the tramline markers are set correctly and he would rather see a slight gap than an overlap. John says this is simple to do and costs nothing.
Derek reckons this was one of the most difficult springs to get work done that he can remember. However, like most others, he is now up to date on all crops and finished his flag leaf spray on wheat by the of May.
Winter barley treatments were finished in mid-May, with the final fungicide application slightly later than normal as heads were half out on some plants. The heads emerged very quickly this year, two to three days in some cases, so it was challenging to get timings spot on.
Spring barley is struggling a little in some fields but those that received compost before sowing are fine. Some of the crops will receive their final split of nitrogen before GS30/31. He has decided to divide the N applications this year to try to reduce the risk of losses. So it’s a number of smaller amounts rather than one big application. He also tried some protected urea products this year, again with the intention of reducing losses.
All the spring barley received an aphicide at the three-to-four-leaf stage. Derek decided against applying a herbicide at that stage, as he didn’t want to stress the crops. There were no weeds present anyway so he felt it would have been a waste. Herbicide will be included in the next application and the weeds that are now present are small but not competitive.
Derek tried out an IPM demonstration this year by applying some marking spray to a winter wheat crop at the leaf-three fungicide application. This helps growers to identify if the application is applied at the optimum timing as the marking spray shows the specific leaves that the fungicides cover. He was happy to report that leaf-three was fully covered, along with 50% of leaf-two, which is ideal. This then gave him confidence that his first application was applied correctly and he was able to plan his flag leaf application.
All wheat and barley crops are up to date in terms of fertiliser and fungicide treatments. Barley received its final application as the awns were peeping, while the flag leaf application was applied on wheat by 25 May. Cellule, a bearded French wheat variety, has tillered well and developed very quickly during the spring, which has helped to spread the workload for fungicide timings. The Husky oat crop has come through the spring very well and is very clean. He is waiting to apply the head spray any day now.
Kevin has changed over to all liquid nitrogen for accuracy of top dressing on the 30m tramlines, plus he doesn’t have to wait for dead calm days. The only worry that he has is the risk of scorching the crop if he applies a large amount of nitrogen on warm days.
Kevin is in the process of drawing up straw contracts as he has calculated that the time taken for him to handle straw on the farm is not cost-effective, especially when he has other work to be done. Given the price of straw this year, Kevin wants to be fair to both parties so all the straw will be sold on an acre basis and be baled and removed by “specialist” straw contractors.
The baling contractors will be given the LPIS numbers so that they will know the areas of the fields. However, there will also be rules such as keeping all traffic on tramlines to help minimise damage to the soil.
Biosecurity is also a concern for Kevin, so balers will need to be cleaned before coming on to the farm and before they leave. This is to reduce the risk of spreading problem weed seeds such as sterile brome and wild oats.
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