Better Farming - October 2016

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30 Farm News First > Better Farming October 2016
wheat market that offered farmers
an average C$253 per tonne. Yield
levelled at just short of 3.4 tonnes
per acre in the best areas, giving a
per-acre gross margin of almost
exactly $500.
Not too far from the Bayer spray
resistance management plots in
German Westphalia, grower Mathias
Jaeger reflects on the new integrated
approach at his farm. His rotation is
much wider than a lot of the
neighbouring farms and includes not
only winter wheat and canola, but
also grass for seed production, barley,
sugar beet and corn.
With his wheat, Jaeger averages
four tonnes per acre. He hasn’t used a
plow on his heavy clay loam fields for
the past eight years. Herbicide
treatment – including glyphosate – is
still the big gun here. But the inte-
grated approach, such as mechanical
weeding whenever possible and very
accurate timing of spray applications,
is crucial.
“Integrated management pays off
every time,” he says.
Just like the Germans, British
farmers have been pushed by the
European political pressures as well as
growing weed resistance into finding
answers to life after glyphosate.
Speaking at the British Crop Produc-
tion Council weed review meeting
last fall, Jock Willmott from the land
management organization Strutt &
Parker LLP pointed out that glypho-
sate-resistant blackgrass was adding
at least six per cent to crop-growing
costs.
On the east side of the North
Atlantic, England is recognized as the
home of winter wheat monoculture.
Now, a more varied rotation is being
advised by crop advisors and industry
representatives more generally,
including the insertion of grass, field
beans and lupines into the rotation. A
British approach also features
building in more crop competition
for weeds with wheat drilled at
higher-than-standard plant popula-
tions of up to 300 plants per square
metre.
Barley is another weapon in the
integrated fight against weeds because
this cereal offers higher natural
competition to weeds, according to
British crop advisers.
The country’s Agricultural and
Horticultural Development Board
goes a step further than the
European mainland by recommend-
ing a fallow year when the blackgrass
situation gets really bad. The board’s
figures show this strategy, with
accompanying intensive mechanical
cultivations, can reduce weed
infestation by as much as 80 per
cent.
Whatever happens with glyphosate
in the end, the threat of its withdraw-
al has certainly made farmers all over
Europe much more receptive to the
integrated approach for improved
weed control and often lower input
costs. BF
GLYPHOSATEALTERNATIVES