Mzuri’s Christmas Takeaway – Top Tips For 2017

With most of the farm jobs out of the way, I like to look back over 2016 and take stock.

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All in all, it’s been another good year for Mzuri Trial Farm, despite the weather throwing a few spanners in the works. We had a cold spring, a wet June and a dry autumn to contend with but strip tillage has proven its worth yet again, with spring crops having yielded well and autumn drilling looking really promising.

The Farm has been busy with crop trials and customer visits right up to the end. Last week, we have welcomed some visitors from Poland, Germany and our native UK who have come to learn more about our system and have left with a few handy tips on strip tillage.

Talking of tips, I think it’s important to keep an open mind so we can look at things in a new light and continue to better ourselves. As I look back on the year, I make a mental note of farm successes and things we could have done differently. As always, I’m happy to share these with you. Here’s my Christmas takeout with my top tips for 2017:

1. It pays to be patient.

Waiting until the soil has warmed up to at least 8° C in the spring has paid dividends – the crop has got away quicker and soon caught up with the earlier establishment, yet without any risk of seed or plant damage.

2. Cheap and cheerful does it.

Consider linseed as a break crop. It’s cheap and easy to establish and is a nice little earner on a striptill system. We drill it straight into overwintered cover crop with plenty of moisture – typically radish – and we’re yet to have a bad harvest. This year, the yields have come in at over 3t/ha and the returns were better than some of the conventional crop expectations quoted by Mr Nix. Not only that, linseed had cleansed the fields of weeds nicely so it gets top marks in my book.

3. Follow the combine with cover crop.

To take full advantage of the warm weather, we’ve drilled our radish directly behind the combine. It got established really well and covered the ground in just three weeks, harvesting the sunshine and mopping up residual nitrogen. I find that every day’s delay at drilling costs almost a week’s growth come Christmas time. Now fully mature and up to my waste, the radish is starting to break down, making way for a clean-up operation with glyphosate in January.

4. Direct drill OSR early.

Drill rape early – ideally, before the 3rd week in August. We have run a number of trials with the new style low disturbance coulters this year, one of them being used in direct drill mode with the front Pro-Til legs out of operation. This particular plot was put in late (12th September) and, in all fairness, it has come up well. Double trouble struck in early September in a form of a flea beetle attack and a slug problem, and I’m convinced that the early drilling was partly to blame. Hardly past the cotyledon stage, the young plants did get a serious thrashing. Luckily, the crop has recovered amazingly well but I’ve learned my lesson – seed earlier and place a band of fertiliser under the seed to spur the hungry roots on. Just like radish, direct drilled OSR should follow the combine as closely as possible.

5. Flexibility is key to successful establishment.

Even the most perfect of soils don’t always lend themselves to the same treatment and it’s important to adjust your technique to suit the particular conditions and the crop. We’ve done a number of crop trials using different drill set ups and coulters this year. Direct drilling worked particularly well with the new single shoot coulter, creating minimum disturbance whereas inter-row drilling has proved to be the perfect formula for radish establishment into long straw stubble. For grass ley seeding or a conventional finish look, the new twin tine has done exceptionally well. It seems that we now have the drill for all occasions so keep your eyes peeled for the new coulters coming out next year.

6. Carry the can for glyphosate.

It’s had a lot of bad publicity in the press recently and it is difficult to imagine the future without it. I do think, however, that it’s getting more stick than it deserves and if farmers used it more conservatively without relying on it for crop desiccation, we may well see a reduction in public pressure for its complete ban. On Springfield Farm, we only apply glyphosate “out of crop” and never desiccate. This could well be the way to go if a compromise had to be made.

7. Four is the magic number.

I’ve left over four metres to nature this year which is not only beneficial to farm wildlife but is practical too. The wider headlands mean that I can go out and trim the hedges at any time over the winter months without damaging the crop. Forming part of the headland is an 80cm sterile margin around the fields which helps us keep the weeds at bay. It seems that size does matter after all!