Pondering Picking Peas

Peas emerging 19th April

For the first time we have no-tilled all of the hand picked peas up on the Bredon Hill.  Previously the crop had been cultivated to create the seedbed to plant into.  Historically the fields would have been ploughed in the autumn and left bare over winter, then cultivated ahead of the drill (planter).  More recently the fields were cultivated (quite deeply) ahead of the drill and then planted, but not any longer!  The picture above shows the peas emerging through a sprayed off cover crop of oats.  The oats were planted the previous autumn and left to grow over the winter.  The plants were using the sunshine and nutrients available to them to capture carbon, in the form of plant material-roots, stems and leaves and also feeding the biological process in the soil with sugars which the plant releases through the roots.

Peas in row 11th May

Once the crop was sprayed off with glyphostate, to kill all the green material, the seeder planted the peas.  It was a very dry spring this year but by not cultivating the soil we held all the available moisture-enough to get our crops to establish very evenly.

Peas meeting across the row 26th May

As you can see from the pictures above the crop established very well and continued to grow on and produce a very good yield of quality peas for the fresh vegetable market.  This year the fields designed for peas have once again been cover cropped with oats and they are preparing the seedbed for next years peas which we will start to plant from the end on March 2018.

Cranfield University - National Soil Resources Institute

I can't believe where the last month has disappeared too. After Canada, lambing day and the spring work on the farm, things sure have been very busy.  Last week we hosted Natasha King, a 2013 Nuffield Scholar, who we met in Canada.  So as I was heading to Cranfield University with Tom Sewell to meet Professor Jane Rickson, Natasha came along as well.  After half a days crop walking with Dominic the day before, we were slowly converting this Kiwi to a life alongside dairy cows!

The day at Cranfield was fantastic, Jane looked after us really well and lined up a great line of people available to tell us about he various areas of research they were undertaking.  Karl Ritz was able to host for a while after lunch which was fascinating, to hear his thoughts on where arable cropping could be heading.  We mused about mixed cropping in the same field, seed mixtures not just of different varieties but also of different crop types.  In the past livestock farmers could have grown peas and spring barley together as a whole crop, baled and fed to livestock.  Karl was talking about harvesting these mixes and then selling it as a blend or separating it out in the grain store.   It would be very interesting to hear the industries views of segregation of different crops or selling blends.  Does it matter for instance if a group 1 milling wheat is a mixture of Crusoe, Solstice and Gallant if it all makes the specification, but requires less fungicides, with the same yield?  I guess these are things that organic farmers use to try and make sure 2/3rds of the crop survives a fungal attack.  Maybe now is the time to slacken off the homogenised world of specifics and go with a more natural diverse scenario?

Later in the day Professor Rickson took us to the soil hall which was a tremendous asset to have.  The trays above demonstrate how different soils under cultivation behave in different rainfall events with different topography.  The tray above shows the effect on soil movement of a buffer strip, slope and tramline.  When the water has reached a certain velocity then it moves down the slope taking soil particles (carrying pesticides and fertilisers) with it.  These have been stopped by the grass buffer (right) but can this area act as a reservoir for super pollution during a once in a lifetime rainfall event when the soil particles contained in the buffer strip are washed out of the strip?  A debate for the future, all about the width of your buffer!  It also highlighted Tom's Nuffield topic of direct drilling and some of my previous thoughts, leaving crop residue on the surface through min-till or direct drilling is better for water quality and reduces soil erosion, and that is a fact.

We finally ended up in another area of the building looking at the soil pits that can be used to simulate cultivations and compaction and what can be done to remove or alter these in-field problems.  The facility has the option to get any soil moisture level required, by simply simulating rainfall, which will obviously have an effect on the machinery being tested at any one time.

Again, more questions were asked than answers found, and lots of food for thought, not sure when this diet is going to start!

Hill Top-Topdown-Top Job

Between the showers, (incidentally it's been the second wettest July for 58 years at Overbury) we have managed to get our new cultivator and tractor into action. Derek is using the machine after winter barley, straw baled and removed, getting a growth of weeds and volunteers before we plant Oilseed Rape. The field is the same one that we cut on the 28th July late into the night. The fuel usage of the tractor is in the region of 40L/hr depending on whether he's going uphill or down. This equates to about 20l/ha or (£8/ha), which is pretty ecomonical, for doing this sort of operation. Outputs of the 4m topdown on Cotswold brash have been in excess of 35ha/day or 86 acre's, when it dries out hopefully we can get rolling on the heavier land, where the operational costs will undoubtedly be greater.