Recent days have brought home to me the focal role of the plough within Irish tillage. It’s a proven technology with undiminished potential.
As the tillage sector looks to the future – one within which the use of herbicides will be strictly limited – it is obvious to me that ploughing will, once more, become centre stage from a soil cultivation perspective.
Consider the facts – herbicide-resistant weeds are gaining a foothold in all our crops. And given current trends, their numbers look set to increase exponentially.
Blackgrass battles
I walked crops of wheat, barley and oats in the east of England last week, all of which were heavily infested with blackgrass.
Up to this point, I was very aware of the challenge posed by the weed to English growers, but had never had an opportunity to see it up close and personal.
Over the years, blackgrass has developed an almost total resistance to selective herbicides. Some of the crops I walked last week contained up to 400 blackgrass plants/m2. Infestations of this magnitude can reduce final cereal yields by up to 3t/ha.
The only way to minimise the impact of the weed on infected farms is through a combination of cultivation techniques and rotational crop changes.
From a cultivation point of view, the use of min-till or zero-till systems do nothing at all to help the situation. In fact, they probably facilitate the further growth in blackgrass numbers.
The plough
Ploughing however, acts like a re-set button. By burying blackgrass seeds to depths below which they cannot germinate, genuine control of the weed is achieved.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Irish Sea, herbicide-resistant blackgrass populations are fast becoming a challenge for tillage farmers. All of this was confirmed by a recent Teagasc study, the results of which were made public at this year’s National Tillage Conference.
And other resistant weeds are also making their presence felt on local farms: Italian ryegrass, bromes, and canary grass are among these.
Many people are happy to decry the plough. They point to the costs involved and the perceived damage to the soil biome caused by ploughing.
Neither of these arguments hold up. The reality is that ploughing will consistently add to the yields achieved from all cereal crops; in other words, it will always pay for itself.
Moreover, the most recent research indicates that a soil’s biome and physical structure will be fully reconstituted six months after ploughing has taken place.
In my opinion, taking the plough out of Irish agriculture is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.