N-tester confirms YEN winter wheat results

Considering our focus on fine tuning our crop protection programmes to improve yields, it seems like a bit of a backward step to not apply an autumn herbicide, but it’s just one of those years!

We were also really keen to try applying autumn trace elements to wheat for the first time to assess if they are a worthwhile spend for us, but there’s always next year.

The annual Yield Enhancement Network (YEN) awards were held a fortnight ago down in Newark and we were delighted to see the 'Best yield potential' award being won by Easter Ross farmer, Donald Ross. He achieved 83% of his yield potential with a 14.8t/ha crop of Viscount, which also earned him second place in the 'Highest yield' category.

This is an amazing achievement for Donald, with more than 170 entries to the competition and Scotland can now put ‘wheat growing’ below ‘tennis’ and ‘binge drinking’ on the list of things it does better than England!

Though greatly overshadowed by Donald’s success, we were pleased to have gained a placing in the top 10 of the yield potential category with our 12.5t/ha crop of Motown achieving 70% of its yield potential, an improvement on last year’s crop of Zulu which achieved 62.5% of its yield potential.

The feedback provided in our YEN report showed that the crop was low in protein, indicating it had not received adequate nitrogen, even though we had applied over 220 kg/ha of N between seed bed fertiliser and liquid N.

Looking at N-tester results from the plants during May and June, we could see then it was deficient of nitrogen, even though it had recently received applications. We now reckon the drought we had in the spring must have affected the plants' ability to uptake the available nitrogen. Remember that time we had a drought and actually wished for rain?

Anyway, this experience has influenced our decision next year to change the nitrogen regime on the YEN wheat from three nitrogen applications of 250l/ha, to potentially five smaller applications. That will mean applying more nitrogen overall, more often and getting the first application on earlier.

We will then benchmark the cost of these extra applications in relation to the cost of fertiliser and the two extra sprayer passes to see if it would be worthwhile to adapt our fertiliser programme across all of our wheat.

I would really recommend getting involved with YEN to anyone, particularly young farmers with an interest in arable farming, as the feedback you get is brilliant, with soil, standing crop and grain samples all being analysed as part of the competition, and the information and recommendations to resolve issues all being given back to you.

We are now starting to do our benchmarking for 2016/2017, using the new AHDB FarmBench system which we’ve found, so far, to actually be pretty straight forward. We are optimistic that figures might be a bit better this year due to the fact that we haven’t invested in any major new kit or infrastructure and as grain prices, and yields have both been slightly better.

We decided not to invest in any pieces of larger machinery this year, despite having tractors with a lot more hours on them than we would like. We have a MF 6495 on 12,000 hours and a MF 6480 on 10,000 hours, but realise we are unlikely to get away with these disaster-free for another harvest.

So, we will be looking to change one within the coming year ... or, maybe Santa will bring dad something red and shiny, you never know…

Fact file:

Rachel is part of a family farming unit in the Black Isle where its runs a mixed enterprise of 332 ha of mainly spring barley for certified seed and malting, plus winter wheat for seed, oilseed rape and potato and carrot lets. That's complemented by permanent grassland carrying a sheep flock and over-wintered cattle. It also carries out carrot growing and related contracting operations.