Restricted fertiliser availability is encouraging rotational change on Romanian tillage farms; fertiliser price is also an issue in this regard.
Co. Kildare man Jim McCarthy runs a 20,000ha grain and oilseed farm in Romania.
This year will see him reduce his acreage of maize while upping the area of both soybean and oilseeds grown on the farm.
He explained: “Crops, such as soya and sunflowers, require considerably less nitrogen, phosphate and potash, relative to maize.
“Second corn within a rotation needs an extra 50kg of nitrogen. So we have decided to take these crops out altogether this year.
“Soybean is wonderful to have within a rotation as a crop. We have a lot of potash naturally occurring in our soils.
“But a lot of it was not plant available because of the high magnesium levels that accompanied it.”
Adding lime was found to be the only way of reversing this blocking action of the magnesium.
“We actually found ourselves adding large quantities of lime to soils that already had a pH value of 6.5. The magnesium was accounting for about one third of the soil alkalinity,” McCarthy explained.
“By adding lime we increased the base saturation of calcium in the soil. In turn, this freed up the plant availability of the soil potash.
“Our soils naturally contain 350-500ppm of potash. The addition of calcium-based lime has been a great saving for us.
“Between 2014 and 2021 we broadcast a lot of phosphorous on the land. This has helped improve the inherent fertility of the land,” he said.
Fertiliser application
The use of new planters has helped McCarthy to place seed precisely while also putting fertiliser directly adjacent to the growing crop.
“This works with all row-based crops, including beet, maize and oilseeds. A fertiliser mix of nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur and zinc is placed in close proximity to the planted seeds,” he said.
“In addition, all our maize, beet and soybeans are seeded with a 500mm row spacing. This means that we can sow out 11,000ha of land with just four planters.
“Each of these machines cost €200,000 plus VAT. They are pulled by 500hp tractors, travelling at 14km/hr in the case of corn and soybean.
“The speed is dropped down to 12km/hr when planting sugarbeet. However, it is still an amazing sight to see crops being sown out at this speed.”