As spring is just around the corner The Scottish Farmer spoke to arable farmers to find out how they are getting on with winter and spring crops.
Zander Hughes from Forth Crop Solutions in Fife has found that the heavy rainfall last October has caused some delays in his crop cycle.
“We have quite a lot of crop in the ground at the moment and everything that went in early is doing well but anything that went in after that third week in October is very mixed,” he said.
“The weather also meant not much rolling was able to be done apart from oil seed rape. Ploughing has also been compromised because of the poor ground conditions because of the wet.
“I’ve got a list as long as my arm of things needing done but the weather hasn’t been very helpful and more rain is forecasted for the weekend so the time to do everything is much tighter.”
As a result of this, Zander has had to change his spray programmes with everything now needing to be rolled in the spring.
Willie Harper is a beef, sheep and arable farmer in Renfrewshire and was able to get all his winter barley sown early before the poor weather.
“Got the barley in the ground in good time and it was the right move because then the weather just broke, our winter crops are doing well despite it but hopefully spring is around the corner.
“It’s so wet we won’t start ploughing until March because the ground is too wet.
“Our main concern for this year is buying feed barley, this year it will be in high demand and I expect the prices will be going up.”
Amy Geddes represents East Central on the NFUS national combinable crops committee and farms near Arbroath, Angus.
Amy has all her winter crop in, albeit later than hoped. She said: “It’s been horrendously wet here but we got all the winter crop in that was planned, even if the oilseed rape went in much later following late cut spring barley. We managed to sow our last field of wheat after potatoes during the dry spell in December.
“I had basically written it off but by some miracle the crop has appeared, and everything has on the whole wintered well considering the amount of rain.
“We have just started ploughing for seed potatoes in the last few days and weather depending will plough the spring barley ground next. We are in the process soil sampling again to guide our nutrient management planning over the next five-year cycle.”
Scott Campbell is an Aberdeenshire farmer based at Kirkton of Kinellar. He has oats, wheat and oil seed rape in the ground despite record rainfall in October and December. He said: “We saw 35-45ml of rain in one day which I think was a new record. Early sown crop seems to be okay but later stuff isn’t looking as strong.”
Scott has managed to get some ploughing done with 40% of his 230ha spring barley complete.
He is also looking into experimenting with different varieties of crop to see the difference.
“We are using KWS Sassy and LG Diablo for spring barley and maybe looking to add Firefoxx and Diviner.
“We have stopped using LG Skyscraper for wheat and opted to go for number of new ones including KWS Dawsum, Colosseum, Bairstow, Bamford, and SY Insitor so hopefully we will see what works best.”
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