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An overall generalisation of the 2019 harvest would point to heavy crops of both grain and straw.
Obviously there are exceptions, but the damp and mild spring and summer have resulted in higher-than-average yields, at least in this part of Co Down.
I would love to hold my own small acreage up as a shining light in the world of spring barley, but despite being delighted with my 2.67t/ac(at 16% moisture), there are numerous reports of spring-sown cereal easily surpassing the 3t barrier.
Nevertheless, my agronomist reckons over 2t of dry barley is a great yield, considering it was a low-input crop.
My own thoughts are that if this was low-input, I wouldn’t like to be journeying too far down the path of multi-applications of sprays and fertiliser. Fertiliser was taken to 100 units/ac nitrogen, weed control was a three-way tank mix to ensure complete eradication of all the nuisance stuff, and disease was held at bay by a full-rate dose of Mobius (Prothioconazole + Trifloxystrobin).
I resisted the temptation of using a growth regulator, since the whole field seemed to be delicately poised between being just heavy enough without looking too soft and dangerous. That was before a few weeks of warm temperatures and heavy, thundery showers around flowering time, which resulted in about 15% of the field going down.
Applied
Glyphosate was applied on 24 August at 2l/ha. With holidays planned for mid-September, I needed to reduce the likelihood of a delayed harvest, since heading away with the barley uncut isn’t ideal.
As it turned out, we just got it cut and baled by the skin of our teeth due to constantly changing weather conditions. Harvest was done on 7 September, two weeks after the glyphosate was applied.
The combine started at 5pm and it was finished at 8.30pm. Thankfully, the mixture of late-afternoon sunshine and a decent breeze kept the straw reasonably crisp and free-flowing, because a clammy sort of day would have made harvesting almost impossible.
Only people who have driven combines will fully understand the frustration of straw lying across the dividers and bulldozing itself into small piles instead of disappearing magically into the combine’s digestive system.
In an ideal world, straw should have been left for a couple of days, but with rain forecast we baled it the next afternoon. It is now stacked in the shed and seems to be fine, but I remain convinced that all straw should lie in the sward for at least a day, and sometimes more like a week.
Collapse
One issue has again raised its head this season, although it has been an ongoing problem for several years now. Spring barley seems to leap from being some way off ripeness, to collapsing off its feet in about two or three weeks.
I remember cutting barley in the 1980s and apart from crops that were overfed with nitrogen, all spring barley stood straight up, with the ripe heads pointing straight down. It maintained this stance for what seemed like week after week, only reaching a straw-broken state by the end of September.
Therefore, several questions seem relevant. Is my memory playing tricks and am I viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses? Are we pushing nitrogen levels higher resulting in softer canopies? Are the newer and undoubtedly higher-yielding varieties displaying some sort of thoroughbred tendencies? Have we bred fungicide-dependant varieties that completely break down when the effects have worn off? Or has harvest weather deteriorated compared with 20 years ago?
If anyone knows the answer (or solution) to this modern phenomenon, then please let my combine driver hear about it, because he says he is fed up scraping crops of spring barley off the ground every year.
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