South west farmers go to Ireland (From South West Farmer)

South west farmers go to Ireland

4:10pm Friday 3rd July 2009

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For many growers in the UK what goes on beyond our borders does not often have much impact on our everyday farming methods, however due to its inclement weather conditions and hence higher disease pressure on cereals, there is much to be learnt from the Irish and their approach to arable farm management.

Based on this 13 farmers from across the south west and their agronomists went on a study tour of southern Ireland taking in the Teagasc (The Irish Agriculture and Food Agency) Open Day, as well as a trip to local farms: “Because of the similarities in weather between Ireland and the south west of England, we thought it would be very interesting to go and see what if we could bring home from some of the lessons that the Irish have learnt, for example often fungicides start to break down earlier due to the exceptional disease pressure, and it is always interesting to see how these are dealt with,” explains AICC agronomists John Clark and Dan Dines who were responsible for organising the tour.

For the farmers, of particular interest was a talk by John Spink, previously of ADAS of his continuing work on spring barley, as this is a crucial part of many of their rotations. The message was clear in that whilst yield response to fungicides in wheat is mainly through protecting the top 3 leaves to maximise grain filling, recent research indicates that barley is different and high grain number is critical for yield. “Fungicide timings in barley must be focussed on protecting ear and grain numbers and this means that the timing of disease control and proportion of spend on fungicides in barley may need to be targeted at earlier stages than wheat with more of a focus on T1 than T2 – this is quite a change to our current approach,” he says.

Leading on from this many growers were very interested to hear about the situation concerning the recent talk of increasing resistance of Septoria to some triazoles. The outcome of this delivery from Teagasc was a recognition that in late 2008 and 2009 isolates of Septoria collected from some crops showed reduced sensitivity to Opus and Proline in laboratory tests not field trials, and the degree of insensitivity was greater for Proline than for Opus.

Subsequently, the isolates concerned have been tested by BASF, where the results from the Teagasc monitoring have largely been confirmed. However, in addition, BASF compared the samples against reference isolates known to have been present in the UK population for a number of seasons and which have continued to be effectively controlled by Opus. The results revealed the Teagasc isolates remained significantly more sensitive to Opus than the UK reference isolates. Many of these isolates are sensitive to Folicur and Caramba.

However, as a precautionary measure Teagasc has recommended the following temporary approach until they can be certain that the laboratory findings are not being seen in field, after which they will be revised.

Teagasc recommendations Not using a triazole at T0, only using clorothalonil Only use Proline once in a programme or Opus twice and always with CTL or boscalid Using Folicur or Caramba at T3 Of much of the additional material on offer such as maize weed control trials, energy crop trials, on area of particular interest to the farmers was that of the use of min till in controlling pests and beneficial invertebrates – work conducted at Teagasc to date shows that min till cereals have significantly fewer aphids and less aphid transmitted virus than conventional plough established crops; straw incorporation also reduced aphid numbers and virus incidence. Interestingly, slugs were found to be more plentiful in min till crops and where straw was incorporated, with a tendency for more leaf damage but no difference in plant numbers.

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