With the closed period for slurry application now over, we will start applying slurry immediately.

Ground conditions are excellent and with wide tyres on the slurry tanker and the four wheel drive tractor, I would hope for very little damage.

I presume it is easier on dairy farms where there are parlour washings etc, going into the general slurry mix

I would prefer to use an umbilical system to further cut down on possible compaction damage, but I find that with no yard washings in the slurry, it needs to be more diluted than what can be handled by the conventional tanker, which means more water to the tanks and agitating to get an easily handled mix.

I presume it is easier on dairy farms where there are parlour washings etc, going into the general slurry mix. We added a biological slurry additive over a month ago, so I presume it will have worked by this stage.

We will begin on the fields that were the last to be closed up in late November. They have least grass on them. Given the growth in the earlier closed paddock, we will take a grazing and then go out with the slurry at about 1,500gl/ac.

At this stage, we have bought and paid for roughly half the nitrogen fertiliser we will need for the season.

The crops themselves are coming through the winter in good condition

Last autumn, we did a soil analysis everywhere, so we will tailor our first application of compound N, P, K in line with those results, which vary significantly depending on cropping history and how much slurry has been applied.

The crops themselves are coming through the winter in good condition, with no waterlogging damage – though the winter barley is a bit yellower than I would like.

Personally I would attribute this to a need for N, but it’s much too early for that in my view.

In one field with a history of wild oats, which we controlled very satisfactorily last year, there are already too many visible to be controlled by hand rogueing, so we will have no option but to apply a full rate of herbicide.

The emergence of the wild oats is testimony to the survival capacity of the dormant seeds in the ground.