Weather change: The move to colder weather must be seen as welcome, especially for winter crops.

Putting the brakes on growth can be a very useful thing for this time of year and many of our good yield years came from prolonged cold spells in late winter or early spring.

For very forward crops this slows the march towards stem extension and all the difficult and costly management decisions that this would entail.

For crops that are very dense and those with a lot of mildew, this will help to set the disease back.

Prolonged cold hard weather could eliminate this disease but in many instances it will recover.

The cold spell is certainly useful for aphid and BYDV suppression.

But the level of cold we have had to date will not kill grain aphids – it will only drive them underground for shelter and they can re-emerge when suitable conditions return.

So if a crop is not adequately protected there may still be a benefit from an early spring aphicide.

For those with any of the rust diseases in crops, there is little to suggest that cold will have any major long-term impact.

So these may still need to be sprayed when growth gets under way.

This will mean a strobilurin in wheat or a morpholine plus triazole or strobilurin in barley and oats if the disease moves early.

Where mildew is also an issue, one might add Talius to give prolonged protection.

Decisions: Now is the time to be taking serious decisions about what to grow and sow for 2019.

At the moment, it seems unrealistic to believe that grain prices will hold at the 2018 green price levels as it seems possible that we will carry barley in store into the 2019 harvest.

And what happens to straw price is very much in the control of growers.

With €162-€165/t being the opening prices for green barley, the price of €220/t for green beans offered by Quinns at its conference last week seems like a no-brainer for customers.

Other buyers in other parts of the country have equalled this offer to bean growers who have been proactive about growing the crop.

While there are some crops already sown, who knows what the rest of the winter will bring and when the bulk of sowing will get done.

So it is important to consider the range of options for your fields. How many options do you have for individual fields? You may have a preference but what else can you do if option one passes you by, like last year? Try to keep a sensible rotation at the centre of these decisions because a good rotation should be a cheaper way to farm.

Tillage conference: If the tillage sector expects to be taken seriously it has to be seen to be active in numbers at any individual event.

Next week’s Teagasc Tillage Conference (Lyrath, Wednesday) is one such option as it provides solid technical advice as well as a networking opportunity.

This year’s conference will look at the challenges of the economics, Brexit and our decreasing agchem toolbox.

There will also be research updates on breeding for resilience, machinery impact on headlands, break crops, grassweed control, herbicide resistance and oat husbandry.