AS WARMER weather drives the long winter away and thoughts turn to sowing and fertilising a bedraggled Scottish winter crops, in the Ukraine snow is still hampering field operations significantly.

The Scottish crops I have seen are perking up well with warmer temperatures, negating the thoughts of inexperienced scaremongers in parts of the Scottish press earlier in the year!

Usually the spring in Eastern Europe is like flicking a light switch. The move from winter to warm, growthy days is rapid and inexperienced Western growers can be caught out by this rapid shift. This season, the spring has been teasing us, with several false starts and recent snowfalls and low temperature hampering fieldwork.

On our farms in Poland and Western Ukraine, the snow cover is critically important to protect the winter crops from searing sub-zero winds (in 2002, more than 25% of the oilseed rape was lost in Eastern Europe through Arctic March winds). We are now getting frustrated at not being able to travel, as snow melts and fresh falls occur!

Despite stop-start interludes, we have fertilised more than 1000ha each of rape, wheat and sugar beet land with NPK and K for the beet. This is half our wheat and sugar beet, but only 15% of our rape, although another 900ha have received their first N dressing as ammonium sulphate.

The soils in Western Ukraine are deficient in sulphur, just like Scotland and, as here, ammonium forms of N (such as urea or ammonium sulphate) are best for the crop early in the season. The soils in the east have higher levels of P and K, but lack the wetter western climate.

More worrying in Eastern Ukraine is the potential loss of up to 30% of the oilseed rape crop from dry seedbeds at establishment! Plants that came through in many areas were small and only time will tell whether they will have survived as snow melts and they attempt to start spring growth (see picture above).

There are reports of significant acreage of winter kill in the Eastern wheat crop – we shall see! With current world stocks at an eight-year high, there will need to be a major catastrophe in a key grain growing area to boost prices significantly.

We are farming without any government support on our Ukrainian farms, but our Polish units have gained significantly from EU membership and investment.

It is important that investors don’t lump all Eastern European nations together, as the best performers, like Poland, are completely different to poorer ones, who are struggling.

But a lack of EU quotas and flexible soils in Ukraine allow us to respond rapidly to market prices, so this season it is down wheat and up beet! This is in response to increases in world sugar prices due to shortages caused by bioethanol production.

Our Irish investors view this with some irony, as beet production has ceased in Ireland and ‘parachute’ payments for Irish growers ceased this spring. We are producing yields at around 55t/ha or above – double the national average.

Although our input costs per ha are higher, it is a good crop, though late lifting impacts on rotations, as winter cropping after beet is impossible and soil damage can be a problem.

For the first time, we are trialling a small area of both soya and carrots, with the latter for local juicing and fresh markets.

In our first season four years ago, only 70ha of potatoes were grown as experienced Angus farmer, Mark Laird, together with Russell and George Taylor, of Taypack, and myself set up a pilot project, using Scottish seed and know how. With the help of individual Irish investors this grew to 700ha in year two following a successful first year.

The crop was split into seed, processing and table varieties, which easily outperformed the locals, where home grown seed for 20 years hammers yields to a national average of 13t/ha, compared with our 40t/ha without irrigation.

With further investment from the Irish agricultural and food group, Origin PLC, the potato area has increased further to more than 10² km planned for 2010. A huge investment in potato storage and dressing and grain drying and handling facilities has also taken place.

An early challenge was land reinstatement after 12 years or so of fallow. A mixture of herbicides, including using more than 30 tonnes of RoundUp, was used to bring rampant couchgrass and loose silky bent under control. The use of the right adjuvant gave major improvements in speed and totality of control, potatoes were then planted as a cleaning crop.

A major shock was the high number of pendraki, or chafer beetle larvae emerging once the land had been ploughed. These are similar to those we often see in domestic lawns in the UK, but in Ukraine they are the size of large king prawns and will eat up to 40% of your potato crop and make the rest unsaleable.

Fortunately, careful use of cultivations, rotation and Prestige potato seed treatment reduced damage to negligible levels.

Moist warm weather also gives us a high blight risk, particularly in susceptible crisping varieties such as Lady Clare. We are dressing and loading about 200 tonnes of potatoes daily at the moment as our investment in storage has paid off, with cold weather creating supply problems for other suppliers.