LUXIMO® ON FARM: Daniel King
About Daniel
Daniel King farms approximately 740ha of tenanted and contract farmed land in Bourne, South Lincolnshire.
Pasture Hill Farm lies on heavy soils. It is a purely arable farm with a mix of winter and spring crops including winter wheat, spring oats, winter oilseed rape (OSR) and winter beans.
Traditionally cultivations were plough-based, but today Daniel uses minimum tillage.
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Black-grass
Daniel has had black-grass at Pasture Hill farm for over 25 years.
Initially it wasn’t causing too many issues but a tight rotation of wheat and oilseed rape meant the grass weed population escalated.
“10-15 years ago we were having big swings in yields and would regularly see tonnage drop from 10t/ha to 3t/ha purely because of the black-grass pressure,” he explains. “It meant we were applying glyphosate to large areas of crop. Thankfully we’re now a long way from where we were.”
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Cultural controls
Daniel is using every cultural control available to him. Despite the heavy land, he is using delayed drilling on his winter crops – none are sown before 15th October. He chooses vigorous varieties and, with the premiums returning for group 1 varieties, 2024 sees Daniel returning to old favourites - Skyfall, Extase and Palladium. To maximise crop competition, seed rates are kept high - between 500 and 600 seeds/m2 - and nitrogen applications total 220kg/ha.
Spring cropping has been introduced into the rotation to extend the opportunities to create stale seedbeds, these have also been chosen with black-grass in mind. “Spring oats are in the rotations because they seem more vigorous than alternatives like barley,” he explains. “We can drill them earlier, and there’s a better end market. Fundamentally, spring oats are a good break crop and while they aren’t as good as OSR or beans as an entry for first wheats, they are not far off.”
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Chemical controls
Over the years, Daniel has seen black-grass adapt to many herbicides.
“Years ago, we knew it was resistant to fops and dims,” he says. “Initially we were using IPU and trifluralin mixes – Wildcat, Cheetah and Topik, for example - they did a really good job for the first two or three years. From there we moved to the first of the sulfonylureas – (Atlantis) but they ran out of steam pretty quickly as resistance developed. Today we’re focused on residual chemistry and use heavy pre-emergence herbicide stacks.”