Down on the Farm - Another Farming Year
The farming year always finishes when the harvest is all gathered in, and as you know from my rather short article last time this was completed two weeks later than normal, but at least it is all in the shed.
As soon as the combine is through the field we go in with a cultivator to try and achieve a stale seedbed. This is where we try and get a germination of all the unwanted weeds and other seed so we can kill them, either by ploughing or spraying, so that when we come to plant the autumn crop some of the week control has already been done.
Both ploughing and spraying have their advantages and disadvantages. Since the straw burning ban came in to force about ten years ago we have had to dispose of the straw left in the fields by other methods. This has not turned out to be the problem that many of us thought it would be at the time the ban started due to a number of reasons.
Firstly, the increased efficiency of the straw choppers on the combines has made a big difference, and this has been assisted secondly by the way in which the plant breeders have managed to reduce the length of the straw. Thirdly, the way in which we do our cultivations has also helped.
Ploughing has been, and always will be, the best method of soil conditioning, but comes at a price. More horsepower is required to pull the plough and it is always slower than other methods. A seedbed has to be made afterwards with one or two, or sometimes even three, passes with a cultivator. This will use a lot of energy in the form of diesel, and therefore as a consequence, pollution with fumes from the tractor exhaust as well as many man hours and hour on the tractor*.
* Tractors do not record miles but engine hours. Doing a thousand hours a year in a tractor is probably the minimum we need to do to justify the cost of a new machine. A lot of machines do a lot more and some do a lot less. We probably average 1100 hours a year on ours. A combine also measures hours, but we cost them per acre, but as you can imagine, there are only six to eight weeks to work a combine in and not that many hours - but lots of acres!
Minimal cultivations are the more modern approach to this problem. We go in with a huge great cultivator, which will cultivate the soil, condition and roll all at once. It is wider than the plough and therefore we can get over the ground much quicker, thus using less fuel, and in a dry year the bonus is we will not lose as much soil moisture.
This method, although good in some years, is not appropriate all the time, because as will all minimal till cultivations the straw and rubbish is not buried in the way the plough would do it. This leads to what is called in the industry as a "green bridge". This will allow any residues from the previous crop, such as weeds or more importantly disease, to carry on from one year's cropping to the next. We can however, control these problems with sprays; herbicides for the weeds and fungicides for the disease, and sometimes insecticides to cover any aphids that are carrying viruses.
It may sound controversial, but a jolly good burn would not only get rid of the straw but all the diseased weed seeds and other "nasties" which we otherwise have to control with sprays and cultivations. However, it was always a bit dodgy with factors such as the wind and smoke problems, but not least of all wildlife considerations. I am personally pleased to see the end of burning for this reason alone.
With all the straw being worked into the soil the bonus on the heavy soil has been that it is slowly but surely becoming easier to work due to all the organic material, which is being returned in to it.
One other method for straw disposal in this area is to have a contract with the power station at Mepal, which relies only on straw as its source of energy. Although we do not send our straw there, growing energy crops is something that the farming industry is looking at more closely, and with a lot more help from the Government things will hopefully take off in the next few years. Most of our straw is currently either chopped or the barley straw goes back to Newton to our cattle years where it is used as feed and bedding for the cows.