Saturday, March 30, 2024

Crop work went like clockwork

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Cropping demonstrations across cultivation, drilling, harvesting, balage and silage proceeded without a hitch at the South Island Agricultural Field Days at Kirwee in Canterbury.
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Twelve or so hectares can sound like a lot of land area but with several different crops being grown on adjacent strips and some machinery being 10 metres wide there’s not a lot of margin for error.

It helps that each crop and activity is worked at separate times but there’s still a lot of planning and a lot of people to organise.

“There’s a lot of crops in and you need give them all enough room but we’re getting through without too much challenge,” co-ordinator Andrew Stewart said.

“The high point has been the amount of support we’ve had, with every company represented, and we’ve had two machines, for drilling and silage, which are brand new for New Zealand.”

Stewart started out driving machinery at the field days and this is his first year co-ordinating the cropping feature, the biggest agricultural field day demonstration in NZ.

The zones include about 3ha of barley stubble for cultivation and drilling, 2ha of fodder beet, 2ha of maize, 4ha of grass and 1ha of lucerne for harvest.

“With all that’s going on you think you can rapidly be running out of land but we work on doing a third of the crops on each of the three days.” 

A silent auction to sell the silage and bales was held across the three days, with proceeds going to Farmstrong.

Direct-drilling of crops was a feature of the display as more farmers step away from heavy cultivation, with machines that can dispense two or three different fertilisers with the seed, Stewart said.

In a difficult summer with very little rain in the post-Christmas period, the field days was helped greatly by the loan of an irrigation pivot to keep the crops growing, often beyond the normal growing period to keep it available for the demonstrations. With good planning at planting time and in the management since all the crops were presented in excellent condition.  

Among the interested spectators at the fodder beet lifting were Gore partners Chloe Goble and Erik Smak, who operate a contracting business in Southland and Otago. 

As pressure goes on farmers to move away from winter pasture-grazing dairy cows in the years ahead fodder beet will become more and more important, Smak said. 

Their company, Better Beet, specialises in separating the beet bulb and the green leaves so the bulbs can be stored for lengthy periods and fed out as required.  

The Kirwee demonstrations had two types of fodder beet lifting, one taking out the bulbs and green tops together, the system used for immediate feeding-out on farm, and the other separating the tops and bulbs. The bulbs are collected and stored for later feeding-out while the tops are spread and mulched back into the soil.

The same applies to different types of maize used in the demonstrations, with two supply companies involved.

That all means there can be some good-natured competition on the day, Stewart said.

Though he admits to not being expert on fodder beet, his day job as a dairy farmer gives him some connection to the cropping role. 

“I’m keen on the maize and silage. We do all of that ourselves on the farm.”

He hasn’t been milking many cows lately though, leaving that to wife Rachel while he was busy with the field days. There will be a few more days of that while the Kirwee site is cleared of buildings, tents, and machinery and put back into farming mode till the next big event in 2021. 

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