Teagasc’s latest ‘Tillage Edge’ podcast sees crop specialists Michael Hennessy, Shay Phelan and Ciaran Collins deliver a crops review of 2021.
As they pointed out, 2021 will go down as a very positive year for Ireland’s tillage farmers. But, as will always be the case, it did have its ups and downs.
According to Ciaran Collins, the autumn of 2020 was marked by a genuine commitment on the part of cereal growers to get a significant acreage of wheat, barley and oats into the ground.
He added: “Barley was up at around 67,000ha; oats at 15,000 and wheat in and around 56,000ha.
“Crops did get planted in the autumn. But it wasn’t an easy growing season.
“It was a far cry from the autumn that we have had this year. It was cool, wet and there were only patchy sowing opportunities.
“But, ultimately, it did get done in reasonably good conditions. The last cereals were sown in the south during November. And after that it became too wet to get on with any crop establishment work,” he added.
Winter cereals crops review
Collins went on to point out that, for the most part, crops went in to the winter looking pretty well.
“December was cool and wet with January following in a similar vein. There was some water logging of crops. But establishment was generally good,” he explained.
“So, in general crops came out of the winter in generally good shape.”
Shay Phelan reflected on the fact that it was cool and relatively dry in March and April.
“It was also quite cool in May as well,” he said. “But where planting was concerned, there was a week of opportunity at the beginning of March.
“Guys on lighter soils made the most of the opportunity to get crops planted out at that stage.
“But for the bulk of spring crops, planting really didn’t get underway until the end of March. And it continued then until April. For the most part, spring crops were established in good, dry conditions,” he added.
He explained that most crops were rolled straight after drilling and that farmers growing field peas and beans were able to get pre-emergent herbicides on quite readily.
But the problem that many farmers then encountered was the fact that crop growth rates were very slow in the weeks that followed planting. This was a direct consequence of the very cool conditions that prevailed at the time.
Shay Phelan commented: “Spring barley needs those warmer temperatures to allow crops to grow out and tiller.
“It became evident that later-sown spring barley crops tended to struggle during their early growth stages. As a consequence, we saw a lot of trace element-related stresses in spring barley crops.
“Malting barley guys tend to put nitrogen on crops quite early in order to get them going,” he added.
“But even here, crops were not responding, hence the push towards trace element applications, simply to give crops every opportunity to tiller during late April and early May.”