Farmer Focus: Wheat break is insurance for grass and maize
© Tim Scrivener It’s been a fair time for growing grass this summer and autumn. Our challenge has been harvesting it, whether finding a weather window to forage it, or deciding if it’s too wet to graze.
We kept the cows in a few times in late September, but it just didn’t stop growing.
They managed a few days’ grazing in October, but I decided to shut the gate before the end of the first week because of the ground conditions. It was a shame because there was still a good cover on the grass.
See also: Maize Watch: Bumper maize yields for many
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Fortunately, I know a tame sheep farmer who can make use of all the grass and nip it down before Christmas.
Feeding maize again after what seems like a long summer without it feels like a godsend. We cut on 4 October and started feeding straight away.
I’d always rather feed fresh maize than no maize, and wheat wholecrop just didn’t do it for us this year due to the dry early summer – although the maize must have thrived off it.
It yielded roughly 43.24t/ha (17.5t/acre), and with more acres than ever before, we should have enough to see us through to next year’s maize harvest.
The dry spell gave me a chance to sow grass after maize. Like last year, it got a pass with the Simba DTX and a pass with the front-end air seeder and rollers.
I’m pleased to see it is coming through and will make a nice bonus cut next April before ploughing out to follow with maize.
The 8ha (20 acres) of wheat went in without too much drama. I grow wheat as a bit of an insurance policy and it makes a nice break crop for us between grass and maize.
My thinking is, if the grass (or maize) is poor or we don’t have enough acres, we can wholecrop it early in July or combine it and sell it.
It will be the first proper test of my Trimble guidance system. I’m not sure if I had it set up right or if it’s accurate enough for drilling. For this reason, I drilled the field along the road rather than at right angles to it.