Harry's Farm update, How a sprayer works, Linseed in flower & stone walls

welcome to a new Harry's farm video and you find us today in a field of linseed it's really spectacular at this time of year the linseed it comes into flower and we've got about a hundred and twelve acres of it and it sort of made for Instagram I'm going to details out on that in a moment what I'm gonna do today is just concentrate on the arable side of the farm I've got John over there with the big sprayer just doing some fungicides and growth rigs on some wheat I'm gonna explain a bit more about the sprayer why we use that machine particular machine you'll see in action in a moment and agronomist and explain how we get to put the right chemicals on and Wayne etc first of all Lindsey well this is my replacement for growing oil seed rape it's this break crop that you can't grow where you can grow continuous wheat or barley but you get a dip in yield so you tend to put a break crop in and then have a one or two years of a wheat crop which is your main crop so this is my break crop winter linseed and it's been actually a really good year for it we put it in in well September just after when you normally put raping and before all the rain came and it's it's a consistent crop it's the third or fourth year I've grown it and it's done it's done really well what you're looking for is consistency we haven't quite I think it's consistent until I put a drone up and then see it's fairly patchy in places but even in the areas where it wasn't growing its growing back fairly well at the moment it doesn't take a huge amount of input and it's always used to be the worry about harvesting it but by putting the winter linseed in it it it comes to harvest in sort of July when he used to be one of the last crops so it it's coming back because it's a winter winter crop when we just put in the spring it was a bit tricky but you can see they're full of buds you can see all the flowers but there's so many more to come in and what I want to do is extend its flowering time because this is where it's once there you know pollinated cetera that's the heads and I know from last year even if it does rain a lot it those seed heads will stay doesn't shed seed or anything so we've done pretty well with it the harvesting is the tricky bit we'll worry about that come July we'll just see what the weather's going to be but basically this is it in its prime it's been pretty good weed control you get about a ton an acre although perhaps perhaps a bit more but yeah it's it just makes a welcome change to me from all the yellow used to get roasted rape you'll now see in this spectacular lie look linseed everywhere the other nice thing about Lindsay is when you get a year like this when it's decided not to rain after raining every single day up until sort of mid-march it's one of those crops that seems to cope reasonably well when it really turns dry we've only had two bits of rain we'll discuss this later when we have a look at the wheat because there isn't a lot of leaf area there so it's not pumping a lot of moisture out the ground compared to a more bulky crop right what gonna do now and just see the machine coming so we'll go into the other field and have a look at the winter wheat and what we're doing in there it's John now this is um this is a Bateman self-propelled sprayer wit between the booms is 36 metres that's as big as you get really in the UK there are some bigger sprayers on the continent they got 40 meter but this is pretty big as far as they go it's amazing machine he's travelling at about 14 kilometres an hour and so you get a spot rate where you do 30 I can't do 36 times 40 in my head but even if he was at 10 kilometres an hour so now for turning around you're doing knocking at the door of 40 hectares an hour or a hundred acres an hour crazy space and what when I started farming just the speed of this machine how quickly can cover the ground but it's all about timing us when you're growing crops and I just want to explain how we decide what's going on the field so he's put in a say fungicide and a growth regulator on at the moment things that might be a little bit weak killer as well I don't decide what chemical to put on I have to go to an advisor who's called an agronomist and all farms have an agronomist that look over the ground it's like he's like a doctor he is trained and knows all the available active ingredients etc looks at your crop what you've got what disease pressure is what's happening in the country and then comes up basically like a description with what the crop needs and when so I can't buy the chemical it's actually as I say going to a doctor then a pharmacy who then supplies what we should be putting on the crop that comes out John then is fully trained spray operator does a little exam each year the machine has to have an MOT all sorts of things and that's how we control what actually goes on the crop and it's highly regulated as you would imagine but it's a it's an essential part of farming today I think for a commercial farming the other thing to say about this machine not only does it put the weaken is in grow for eggs etc on it also puts the fertilizer on because we use liquid fertilizer on this farm and so you can swap over with this machine the other do fertiliser or sprays and you use a different line as its termed on on the booms that has a sort of dribble bias term Denise instead of putting it into a fine mist to coat the crop that's what the spray is trying to do with those nozzles is to coat as much leaf air as you can when you put in fertilizer on what we want to do is to hit the ground so it's it's a trickle sort of nozzle you'll see it just puts a line out and it once again into soil and then the roots of the plant then pick up the nitrogen and you get at boosting growth so this machine does both jobs the only thing with fertilizer is it's a higher rate water rate you're putting on the crop typical dosey working litres per hectare 300 litres per hectare well I think he's spraying today at 130 litres a hectare so he can go twice as far on a tankful then he can when he's doing fertilizer now it's an expensive machine you used to why I'm carrying a tractor I thought just show you what when I started farm it was all about having a sort of spray on the back of a tractor but a tractor like this Nicolas not my grandson this basically was designed to do draught work you put a plow or Colt wait in the back that pressure does that dig those big wheels give the traction the weight transfers you're plowing puts more weight on those back wheels you get more traction think 911 this my my grandson really needs a four-wheel drive tractor the slightly updating his fleet but that's for drive just gives greater traction the unfortunate side effect of all this is these tire did quite a lot of crop damage and there's quite a lot of weight at their back here because it's all about torque transfer to the ground you don't need that sort of traction on a machine like this so you want the lightest touch you can to go through the crop with minimal damage he's got row crops on as they're termed so narrow tires that don't run over the crop we just walk into the crop so by having the 36 meter tram line it means we are cropping more of the ground it's not a very clean tram line here you see how it it tilts its be boom up as he turned round to make sure it doesn't drag on the ground so he doesn't doesn't hit so it's sort of flared up the wings are like this at the moment and you'll turn in and then they're flopped down that's all automatic he's not touch it knows when it's about sprayed down it goes goes into work position and away he goes you also see a massive clearance on that machine so when he's spraying obscene rate which will be about this tool you can still spray it it still got enough clearance underneath they tend to have it all sort of motors on the wheels or hydraulic drive I'm not sure this is direct drive or hydraulic it's 180 horsepower machine this but just so they've got no sort of axle between the wheels underneath they've got this huge space underneath to go through tall crops that machine is about a hundred eighty thousand pounds worth machine and hence it's just too expensive one farmed half so we thought of John machinery shares over a number of farms he does my sprain and next door as well as his own because you know spot rate of 100 acres an hour and probably working right near 250 acres an hour time he filled it up again water and gone to the next field he can cover a huge amount of ground in a day so for five hundred spray acres a day is quite easily achieved with a machine like that but it's a it's all down to timeless and it's all decided by this a dramatist it also the agronomist actually decides on the fertilizer as well because that's highly regulated so there you go there's a sort of background to what when you see those machines going around they're very clever things I should also add that a satellite controlled it knows where it's sprayed and if you come down a tram line at a diagonal it will start turning bits of its what they really called sections so I'm coming along here I've already sprayed that bit the rate satellite navigator will know that so you'll turn that bit of the boom off and then the next bit as you go over the ground you've already sprayed so it's there's lots of things going on in there it's a nice place to be hands-free aircon etc there you go now it's just have a look at some other things that be going on the farm away from here now we're in that field where I was putting that mustard in which is this just fallow and look at it it's all grown we had I put it in and the rain came perfectly 20 mil of rain and this is what we've got we go down here this is the mustard coming up I can't get over how well it is coming up you got a little bit of flea beetle damage on it there but basically it rained just at the right time and everything has grown it's the best crop I've grown using that spinner you can see here then it's what I've got now is the pigeons have discovered it and there you go so it's eating off there and you've got true leaves as their term you just see cotyledon and true leaves coming up so that's this is the mustard and it's gone a treat more quite like it's cuz I use that rake it I've got rows as well if you look very carefully installed to see rows in the in the crop but it's not really across less successful is actually the area wild birds I put in over there we had the forecast rain came but it was only three mill and it's not enough to actually ship the seed unfortunately so I'm praying for a bit more rain in fact the whole farm is pretty desperate for some rain if you think about this lockdown period it's rain basically twice so the twenty mill when we put this crop in and in the three mill 23 mill over having two and a half three months yeah that's that's tricky at this time yeah when it's the main draw of the of the crop so all farmers are doing a rain dance at the moment actually my best wheat is all starting to sow drought stress so it's all curling up they go it's no sort of spiky leaves because what it's doing it's trying to shade itself from the Sun just stop the transportation it's just and the the wheat is actually in boot you can see the air coming up so hopefully next biosign I do another film it would have rain one more thing to show you yeah I'm pleased to report that markers finish the wall and here it is we basically we put this in so he could complete the wall because you have this sort of edge to work to we had a sort of slight ceremony when he put the last stone in the wall I can't get over how sharp and accurately all these in this say there isn't there is a tiny bit of concrete just on the end just so these don't for it keeps it fairly static but basically this is dry stone no mortar no nothing and it's sort of tied together with these which are termed Stoppers on top and that sort of joins the two together so on did ask whether they put a stone all away through the dilemma with that is there aren't enough long stones to be able to do it in this part of the world so generally it's not done but if one actually fitted it would do it but I just loved how we've done this curve down here just to finish it off a real I mean I don't know if it looks better than the other side or this side but I just love this curve here just lovely so there you go that's what's been going on on Harry's farm next time we'll probably look at some other things and cows arrived and carved down the volume that sort of thing but I hope you enjoyed this video if you have we'll keep watching keep subscribing more videos coming on very soon you

Channel: Harry's Farm

Views: 50,781

Rating: 4.9874969 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: v9ZtNGBxwZI

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020