WTFIH @ Thriplow Farms, April 2018

Need I even talk about the weather this month? Oh well, I might as well mention it. Needless to say, conditions have been somewhat less than ideal at the beginning of March. We had really hoped to have had all of our spring cereals, that’s oats and barley, planted at this point, and ideally poking their heads out of the ground. As it turns out, a snow covering, and temperatures below freezing for days on end, is not very helpful. It’s the middle of March now, and with all this rain we keep having it’s really difficult to see when we actually get started with the drill at all. Provided we do manage to get going in March I won’t be too upset; if we venture into April, particularly with the sugar beet, then it may start to become a bit of a problem. Of course, now it’s too wet, and next month I’ll almost certainly be complaining that it’s too dry - the joys of farming.Luckily we haven’t been entirely prevented from working, and the first batch of fertiliser has been applied to all of the crops that need it. We started at the end of February on our wheat fields that we thought needed a helping hand to get growing quickly. These tend to be the ones where we have planted wheat after another straw crop, like wheat, oats or barley. What happens is that because we leave the old straw undisturbed on the surface, as it breaks down slowly it uses up some of the soil’s nitrogen supply, leaving less for the growing crop. Hence we get started on these fields a little bit early to bring them up to speed. After this little job was finished, and the snowy interlude, we moved on to the rest of the wheat fields, along with the rye and the oilseed rape. This all went smoothly, and was finished in only three days.Usually at this point, towards the end of March, we would be thinking about applying our first of four sets of fungicides to our wheat crops, we call this timing T0 (to be followed by T1, T2 & T3). However, we have now started selecting our wheat varieties not only for yield, but also for their natural disease resistance, so we can skip the T0 on most of the farm. It’s only a small cost saving, but they all count - and who wants to be applying pesticides when you don’t have to?