Crop Watch, West – Farmers Weekly – Neil Potts

Winter OSR has been largely unaffected by this spell of weather and has pushed on very much as expected, with many crops looking the best they have for a number of years. Good ground conditions mean that inputs have been applied at close to optimum timings, with the result that most crops are well structured with minimal or non-existent disease levels.

Winter barleys on the whole are looking good, but many crops have been subject to a bit of stress, manifesting itself as gingery-coloured leaf tips and new growth with abiotic spotting.

The dilemma has been how much plant growth regulator to apply, as growth has been a bit slow, but as we all know winter barley can hit you with some remarkable “bounce back” growth, which can be very lush and very soft. This means crops that looked as safe as houses at growth stage 31 can look like severe lodging risks by GS 33 to 39.

With the relatively dry spell, T0 and T1 applications of fungicide appear to have done a good job at cleaning the crops up.

Winter wheats are, on the whole, looking very promising, but with some very different levels of disease in them, depending on drilling date, variety, plant population and timings of first N applications. At one end of the spectrum are septoria levels that look very challenging to crops, and at the other are those looking remarkably clean. Recent rain will certainly have been enough to kick-start fresh septoria infections, particularly in those crops where there is already a heavy inoculum load.

Winter oats, as often happens in a cold, dry spell, have in most cases been very slow to get going. This spring there are much higher levels of mildew than we have seen for some years, and once again Septoria avenae is very prevalent. This disease, while not recognised as a major problem, is becoming quite a big issue in oats most years in this part of the world.

The dry spell has meant a fairly uninterrupted spell for the planting of spring crops, with most cereals now at an emerged or emerging stage.

Fodder beet plantings have started, and the impatient are now beginning to think about maize, although on many sites soil temperatures are still a touch on the cool side for this.