LUXIMO® ON FARM: Nigel Durdy
About Nigel
Nigel Durdy of Ninevah Farm, near Doncaster in Yorkshire left school at 16 and started work as a contractor before being able to buy some land. He now farms 1,100 hectares in partnership with his brother Adrian.
Nigel is the agronomist and sprayer operator for the business, annually spraying over 2,500 ha of mainly combinable crops with his 36 m Rogator sprayer.
He has been BASIS qualified for 20 years and, during training, recalls someone telling him that a farmer has up to 16,000 possible decisions to make to grow a crop, starting with the choice of field and crop, followed by all the possible options of inputs and timings.
“Fortunately, a lot of it becomes second nature. I drive the sprayer, which helps me get to know the crops and the fields’ black-grass burden.”
Black-grass
The farm has a wide range of soil types with everything from blow away sand to peat, loams and boulder clay.
“We have black-grass across the farm,” says Nigel. “It has built up over the years as it has on most farms. We have some very bad fields and some not so bad. We are just having to manage with it now.”
Nigel uses stale seedbeds widely, and direct drills into these, with drilling delayed in the autumn. He said “We delay drilling as late as we dare. The better the weather, the longer we will wait.”
Rotation
This year the rotation consists of winter wheat, winter rye, spring barley and vining peas. Approximately a third of the farm has been placed into SFI schemes, largely replacing break crops.
“We like to farm the land but with the way the economics are at the moment we are going to use these schemes to keep things simple.
“We do still have some break crops. Vining peas have gone in where the maize would have gone - they’re a good break crop, off early and they fix some nitrogen.”
Autumn 2023
Wet weather disrupted cropping plans.
“Autumn to start with, was pretty normal. Then, about the 3rd weekend in October, when we had drilled the best part of 400 ha of winter wheat and rye, we got 90mm of rain.
“The drilled acreage had all been worked early on, stale seedbeds sprayed off, drilled, and sprayed with Luximo pre-emergence. We thought we had put everything to bed but then through the relentless rain of the autumn and the winter, seed rotted in the ground. We came out with 80- 100 ha of crop and are significantly out of pocket, but that’s how farming goes.”
Some of the failed area has been put into SFI schemes, some has been sprayed off again and some has been direct drilled with spring barley.
Spring 2024
The spring has also been wet.
For spring barley, fields are worked in the autumn and then sprayed off for another stale seedbed in the spring, after which crops are direct drilled.
“We don’t work the land and so we end up with a pretty dry stale seedbed when we do start drilling, with the Vaderstadt drill. The spring barley has come through, some of it has had a tough time, but it’s there. Although the weather has been nothing like the autumn it certainly has been wet enough.”
Looking ahead
Nigel is planning to use Luximo® again this year on his winter wheat.
“On black-grass it’s second to none,” however, he adds “We’ll use it responsibly - we will still be using IPM and trying to get the stale seedbeds, and we won’t be bringing the drilling date forward, thinking we are safe.”
