Latest News - April 06
05.04.06 - BUSY DOING NOTHING
Running a 5,500 acre estate is not a job for a lazy man – but farm manager Michael Turner admits that his ambition is to “do nothing”, especially when he refers to preparing the ground ahead of his drill.
Holkham Estates, which he manages, has largely switched to minimal cultivations, but his aim is to establish crops with no cultivations prior to the drill as often as often as possible – and he expects their new six metre Simba Horsch Pronto DC drill to play a crucial role in that.
Arable cropping occupies 4,000 acres, with 1,000 acres of winter wheat grown for feed and a similar acreage of malting barley, sowing of which is split between winter and spring. Sugar beet occupies 900 acres, with around 600 acres rented out for root crop production every year and the balance being in set aside.
Ploughing is now confined to land going into sugar beet or being rented out for potatoes and root vegetable production. Their primary cultivator on the rest of the farm is a set of Simba 23C discs and a Unipress.
“The long term aim is to do nothing ahead of the drill as often as possible. We previously used a tined cultivator drill that worked well but needed a cultivation pass ahead of it because – on our soils - the tines sometimes struggled to mix the trash in as effectively as we would have liked.
“The discs on the Pronto do a thorough job and create a good tilth ahead of the drilling coulters, even on our stickier land”. He chose the drill ahead of a range of competitors because he said it was “designed from the ground up”, rather than being compiled from relevant bits:
“We had a demonstration over one weekend last autumn and were very impressed. On one field that was subsoiled after potato harvest. The cultivating discs chopped straight through the haulm, as did the discs on the drilling coulters”.
Like the Freeflow, the Pronto DC has a full-width roller ahead of the drilling coulters, so he already appreciates the benefit of working into a firmed seedbed, as it prevents the “disc stall” that can affect disc drills working in unfirmed land
“We need to firm this land but not compact it. The discs do enough cultivation for the drill to sow cereals in the spring straight into land from which sugar beet had been harvested in the late autumn. This will enable us to reduce the number of times we need to do a preparatory pass and that will save a lot of time and money.
“The fact that the drill’s weight is taken on the full width of the roller when turning on headlands should avoid compacting the soil and reduce our need to subsoil”.
It also performed well when sowing spring cereals into marsh land: “We chopped and spread the straw and then disced and pressed in the autumn. This spring there was a really good frost tilth on the surface that we did not want to disturb, so the fact that we could go straight in with the drill was a major benefit.
“We also direct drilled 30 acres of malting barley into land from which sugar beet had been harvested in the autumn and it has established beautifully. You cannot really establish a cereal crop cheaper than that! It also did a good job of sowing spring beans for a neighbour
He feels their current system – they run the drill behind a 240hp John Deere - could easily cover 150 acres a day, which would enable them to cover their whole acreage in good time:
“The tractor pulls it very easily, and could handle an eight metre model if we had one. We have not pushed it hard yet, and have been working in fairly small fields, but we are achieving drilling speeds of 10kph – 12kph.
