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Let’s consider everything and optimise, not cut back and hope – Darryl Shailes – Arable Farming

Nitrogen is an emotive one, but where can we safely cut and what are the potential downsides? ...

We managed to get out of the Waveney Valley and into Austria’s Ötztal Valley in January for a bit of skiing. Last year my skiing was limited to making tracks just across the river in Suffolk on the steeply sloping sides of the Waveney Valley (everything’s relative), but we did have decent snow cover in early February.

While there, we watched Dave ‘Rocket’ Ryding win the slalom in Kitzbühel. It may not seem much of a connection to Norfolk, but Rocket raced at the Norfolk Snowsports Club in Norwich when he was younger and I raced against him.

Rocket’s result was an amazing achievement for someone who learned to ski on a plastic slope in Lancashire. We’ve also got a Norfolk skier, Will Feneley, who learned to ski in Norwich, now competing in the Winter Olympics in moguls – another great achievement.

The Waveney Valley was still very dry when we got back and the only thing I really noticed was how many pheasants were in the garden on February 2. It’s the same every year, how do they know?

We were soon back into the real world of meetings and conferences and thinking about the coming spring.

Input costs are very high on the agenda; however, we must be careful in cutting back too far on some things without consideration of the potential downsides.

In potatoes, we should really be thinking about optimising our inputs and not necessarily cutting back too hard in my view.

With potatoes being so hungry for fixed costs, cutting back the variables without some careful thought can jeopardise the overall profitability of the whole enterprise.

 

Downsides

Nitrogen is the emotive one, but where can we safely cut and what are the potential downsides?

With set skin packing crops, the downsides of not hitting the skin finish targets can take a profitable crop into a loss-making one very quickly.

Colletotrichum coccodes, black dot is the obvious one. We can do many things to help manage black dot, such as soil testing to see what the inoculum level is.

However, most potato soils are generally infected with black dot unless they have had very few potatoes in them.

We can check the variety, but nothing is resistant-most are in the 4-5 range out of a possible 9 where black dot is mentioned, but variety databases and breeders’ notes do not always mention it, so it is down to experience.

We can treat in-furrow and in the crop with azoxystrobin which makes a significant difference. However, the best method is to ensure we don’t have patchy early senescence that induces black dot.

We must ensure the crop bulks quickly and evenly, gets topped when green and sprayed off and in the shed as soon as the skins are set before black dot takes over. The correct nitrogen rate is very important.

With loose skin packing crops and processing crops, we may have a bit more leeway with nitrogen, but other things are equally critical, so let’s consider everything and optimise, not just cut back and hope.

With sugar beet there is an opportunity to trim nitrogen rates in some situations, but again, the biggest difference we can make to profitability is to ensure we do everything possible to optimise inputs, not make rushed decisions based purely on cost and cause bigger problems than this can solve.

Good soil management is needed in all crops, but even more so in taproot crops like sugar beet.

We need to get it growing quickly to get away from potential virus issues and to get to 100% canopy by mid-June to optimise the photosynthetic potential. Good soil management, variety choice, drilling and the correct nitrogen rate and timing need to be optimised to get us there.

In essence we must ensure all decisions are evidence and not emotion-based.

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