Farming practices: focus on Direct Drilling

It was summer last year when we really started to share our ideas about conservation agriculture with our customers, during an event at West Yeo Farm.

Farmers and contractors joined us to discuss an increasingly popular farming technique; direct drilling. Many of our customers hadn’t adopted direct drilling onto their land but were interested to learn about the benefits and see the machinery in action first hand. Direct drilling offers a number of advantages for the farmer, the land and the surrounding areas so supports our first Conservation Ag article, which is why we wanted to share some of the information and learning from our event in June and our follow up event in November (2017).

There are many farming practices which mean farming can be more sustainable, but this time we will focus on direct drilling as we’ve gained experience in this area and have case study examples to share.

 

 

You may or may not know that the aim of a direct seed drill is to place the seed directly in the stubble of the previous crop with minimal soil disruption. For our event we joined up with Opico Machinery who supply one of the most versatile drills on the market, the Sky EasyDrill. The EasyDrill is one of the very few direct drills that can truly be advocated as a direct, a mintill, a grassland and a cover crop drill. It’s versatility doesn’t stop there, on well consolidated ploughing it can also be used in conventional systems too but for this blog we will concentrate on Direct Drilling.

You can find out more about the Sky EasyDrill by clicking here.

The uniqueness of direct drilling means away from traditional seeding and harvesting the land can utilised for the integration of cover crops, altering rotations of crops, incorporating seeding with other applications on the same pass as well as minimal disturbance drilling.

 

 

This all sounds great, but what are the benefits and how do these support Conservation AG and our 3 factor theory?

 

 

Let’s consider the benefits of direct drilling …

TIME
Farming is a busy industry all year round, no matter where you are based, with planting your crop seeds at the optimum time, no doubt, one of the busiest. The beauty of direct drilling is that it makes crop establishment a lot quicker than traditional systems and methods because the job of soil preparation with the distribution of seeds and other applications such as fertiliser, microgranuals or slug pellets can be combined into one pass. This means that more can be done in far less time, freeing up hours in the day for workers to concentrate on other jobs and when time equals money that is key.

LESS GROUND DISTRUBANCE
The efficiency of direct drilling benefits the environment due to their lower energy inputs and the fact that fewer resources are used (or wasted) in the process. The system is also designed to preserve the soil as much as possible. Fewer passes are required across the field as everything can be applied in one go to the ground so compaction from heavy machinery is reduced.

BETTER QUALITY SOILS
Altering rotations of crops and the integration of cover crops improves soil quality by reducing soil erosion, allows more water to infiltrate rather than run-off and can be a beneficial habitation of invertebrates and earthworms. In short, it’s great for the soil and it’s great for crops and overall, much better for the environment than more traditional systems.

LESS DOWN-TIME
No matter how challenging the season, seed placement can be achieved where others fail, even when conditions aren’t at their best. Direct Drilling is designed to enhance the growth and strength of roots by creating enough space and a drainage tract for the roots to grow deep into the soil with optimum disturbance necessary to achieve the best result.

All these benefits create profitable, environmental and social impacts, predominately beneficial. The diagram below shows how these benefits impact on profitability for the farmer, environmentally for the land and socially for the surrounding areas.

 

 

Taking you back to our events, all these benefits were discussed and we have a working farm example to share with you in our next blog.

West Yeo Farm, owned and managed by James Winslade have used a Sky EasyDrill for nearly 4 years and is an advocate of benefits of direct drilling. Since being devastatingly affected by the Somerset Levels flooding during Christmas and New Year 2013/14, James has had a Sky EasyDrill on his farm to help nurture his land back to life with minimal environmental impacts.

Look out for our next article coming soon ….