Low-till back in favour with European farmers

by NORMAN DUNN

It's just over four decades since direct drilling and low-cultivation seeding were introduced onto some of the more advanced grain growing farms in northern Europe. By the 1970s, the popularity of no-plow systems had grown fairly rapidly and in fact acreage sown in this way was doubling every year in grain areas such as eastern England.

Non-inversion systems kept costs down for the European farmer at that time, mainly because straw burning was allowed everywhere. In those days, it was just a case of spreading the straw behind the combine and setting a match to it. A good burn helped make the soil surface friable, got rid of the straw and killed nearly all weed seeds and cutter bar losses.

The savings were tremendous: no plowing, no baling, no carting straw, no autumn herbicide. And other pests, including fungi, were also killed off for free. From France to Denmark, arable farmers reckoned they cut costs by around half when they left the plows in the barn and stayed with surface cultivations or direct drilling. But non-inversion received an almost fatal blow in the 1980s when European governments banned straw burning out in the field.

Nowadays, you need a special licence just to start a small fire in the corner of one of your fields. And, even then, the local fire brigade will likely turn up if passing motorists report the smoke and will then charge you for its "attendance."

Following the burning ban, costs were back almost up to plow levels at a stroke. The weed problems became worse. Herbicide or complete weed killers such as Paraquat had to be stepped up. As well as adding to overall costs, this approach also encouraged weed resistance to a range of herbicides, a curse still very much with us. Straw choppers became a must where low-till was applied. This meant more power was needed on the combine, remembering that in northern Europe straw yields can easily top three tonnes per acre.

This in turn meant more diesel fuel per acre of grain, an expenditure not helped by the powered cultivation and straw incorporation machines brought into the farms to struggle on with no-plow systems, even in the face of a typical European straw mattress lying on the stubble. The weeds, the expense and difficulty of good straw incorporation, cereal disease carry-over and even explosions in seed-eating snail populations where surface trash levels were too high -- all led many farmers to hunt out the plow again from the back of the barn and blacken the field in what we used to praise as a good, clean traditional seedbed.

But diesel fuel is now much more expensive -- farm diesel has doubled in price on German farms since 2000, for example -- and labour costs mean that low-till is definitely in favour once again in Europe. However, farmers haven't forgotten the lessons of the last time around and this means there's usually at least one plow in reserve for use between consecutive stubble crops. In fact, most advisors agree that increased disease resistance in cereal varieties, and not system changes, is the next important step towards cheaper production.

But there are a lot of arable farms now where the rotation has been changed so that the plow doesn't need to be used. A popular example in northern Germany is a rotation of sugar beet, wheat, oilseed rape, wheat, peas and wheat again. This has proved to break the stubble disease chain and includes good opening crops for drilling wheat after minimum cultivations.

What are the differences in costs nowadays between plow and low-till? Well, a team of crop consultants in northern Germany worked out typical examples for a 750-acre, conventionally cultivated farm (two tractors, combine, plow, power harrow/drill combination) and low-cultivation farm of the same size (two tractors, combine, cultivator, universal disc-coulter drill). Total costs per acre were $302 Can per acre, with $288 an acre for the no-plow approach. What's more, the calculation showed that the two-man cultivation/drilling team on the no-plow farm could cover far more acres if required and so costs could be cut even further where more land could be brought into the equation.

Where consecutive cereals cannot be avoided, then the most common answer in Europe nowadays is reducing plow to a maximum 50 per cent of the land each year. Given that good farming always requires a certain amount of flexibility, perhaps this is the best solution under the present technology, plant breeding -- and especially weather -- conditions on this side of the North Atlantic BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.

Total Profit Management comes to the rescue of British dairy farmers

by NORMAN DUNN

But there are still countries where cheese hasn't taken over as protein substitute for meat products. In Britain, cheese consumption is less than half that of Germany. Consumers are not so interested in milk and its products, and this has hit dairy farming hard. With falling demand, processors are offering less money for milk. Current producers' price in Britain is the same as in Germany, whereas four years ago it was 10 cents more.

In between, there have been even lower prices. It's therefore no surprise that the number of U.K dairy farms has dropped between 1996 and 2001 from 32,000 to around 23,000. Average herd size, according to the National Farmers Union, is now about 80 cows. This indicates a steady increase in herd size but, despite this, the experts are confirming that there's no money to be made from milk on the traditional farming business.

So how are British dairy farmers surviving? Some of those that are clients of the national advisory organisation ADAS are keeping their heads above water by using a business analysing approach borrowed from big industries. ADAS advisors have introduced Total Profit Management (TPM), which breaks production down to the most basic of units and then critically analyses costs and other inputs per unit. This approach gives figures such as labour cost per litre of milk produced, concentrate feed cost, electricity, water and so on -- all based on unit of production.

ADAS advisors also encourage their farmer-clients to ask themselves four basic questions about their enterprises: What do we do here? Why do we do it this way? Does it add value? And can we do it better?

For many traditional milk farms, this approach has saved the business. For others, it has fine-tuned management so that milk profits are better than ever, despite the dismal prices.

For instance, one farmer looked at the costs of producing silage and grain for his herd and found he was actually losing money with every tonne he harvested. Now, outside contractors cut the grass and harvest the grain. Total Profit Management means all machinery has been sold except for a tractor, a fertilizer spreader and a liquid manure tanker. This farmer now spends much more time managing his cows. Result: yields have increased, resulting in a dramatic decrease in production costs per litre of milk.

Cutting machinery costs, usually by selling the tractors and implements and hiring contractors, has proved to be one of the first paths to more profit with the TPM concept in Britain.

Another winning way involves paying more attention to home-grown feed quality and rationing. Typical of the advantages here are results from one client whose 108-cow herd now has a 8,225 litre average with 5,000 of those litres now produced from grass and corn silage alone.

In Britain, most farms have hired help for the milk stand. In many of the best examples of increased efficiency through TPM, clients have increased herd size but also expanded milk stand capacity so that no extra labour is needed.

On one such farm in northern England, for instance, TPM revealed considerable potential for increasing individual yield by improving feed quality. Introducing total mixed ration (TMR) formulation upped individual yields by 100 litres per month, with milk protein levels also increased. These improvements, plus adding some cows to the herd and expanding the stand, reduced labour costs from 8.5 to 6.4 cents/litre and this was expected to drop by another cent per litre within 12 months.

Another advantage from the TPM approach is that it encourages the critical examination of bought-in feed costs. A number of farmers have reacted by forming bulk-buying groups to put more price pressure on feed suppliers. For one such group, a typical feed price before getting organized had been the equivalent of $24 Can per tonne over the average paid by a survey of dairy farms in England. Now, this group's average concentrate feed price is actually $19/t below the survey average.

All this has meant that Total Profit Management has really taken off in British dairying and real interest is now being shown in the big business concept by the hog and beef production sectors. BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.

Europeans tinker with diverse harvesting tricks in an effort to beat the weather

by NORMAN DUNN

There's always something new in the harvesting line because, as perfect as the modern combine concept might seem, people never tire of coming up with new ideas. Some of them even work.

Bob McLeod's system of primary threshing out in the field and carting in grain, chaff and weed seeds for more intense separation at the farm silos is interesting because it is really mechanising the old binder concept of taking everything off the field at harvest, including the weeds.

But this latest idea leaves the straw behind. An idea developed at great expense in Sweden in the late 1970s went the whole hog and featured cutting and baling everything -- straw, grain and any weeds that happened to be in the crop. As I recall, the concept was developed with the support of the then Wiebulls plant breeding company with the aim of speeding up harvesting to match the fairly small weather window available even in good years in northern Europe. Energy input was also to be cut, the argument being that the bales could be threshed-out under cover by a lower-throughput, less power-demanding automatic system.

In the end, rain put a thick red line through all these fine calculations. If the straw and grain got rained on -- and this is the rule rather than the exception in European harvests -- it proved almost impossible to get the bales dry again. They couldn't be stored damp, so they had to be opened-up and threshed right away.

Interestingly, this idea made a comeback in recent trials in Denmark with wholecrop barley cut and baled for immediate removal from the field. Quality was less of a problem here because the material was for burning as fuel in municipal central heating plants. The system worked well -- until the Danish government decided not to support the use of grain for fuel because it felt this was not morally correct in a world where millions go hungry.

The North American system of windrowing cereals onto the stubble and threshing later by combine with a pick-up header has been tried here too. The windrowing bit was easy in the few trials that were carried out. But the usual damp weather meant drying on the stubble did not take place. Regrowth did. By the end of October, the plough was busy burying the remains!

Talking of windrowing, one of the biggest obstacles to cost-efficient cereal harvesting in Europe has always been the straw component. At least in the middle and north of the continent, the climate is perfect for huge yields of straw -- two and even three tonnes per acre are not unusual in Britain, Germany or north France.

An ideal answer here seemed to be the Shelbourne Reynolds stripper head, which leaves the straw standing and simply pulls the grain off the stalks. But even although this can easily double combining speed, there's never been a rush to fit the stripper heads in Europe. I suspect the main reason is that combines are mostly bought with conventional cutter heads attached and already paid for. Also, the straw is still there in the field to be cut and baled or chopped in an extra operation.

But despite all these innovations, there are still a number of farmers in Britain sticking to the old binder and doing very well out of it. These people have found a good market for unbroken clean straw which, with today's wheat grain prices at $140 Can a tonne, helps them easily double the income per acre from cereals. The market is the thatching trade for cottages in the English countryside. Good wheat straw, well thatched can protect a house for a maximum 40 years, say the experts, with roof ridges renewed at 20 years. All that's needed back in the yard is one of the old-fashioned big threshing drums with a buncher at the straw exit so that most of the straw stays unbroken.

In fact, visiting one of these thatch-producing farmers underlined for me all the long-forgotten advantages of working with binders. The harvest is longer because you can start cutting earlier and leave the crop to dry off in the stook before stacking. Threshing back in the stackyard can take place whenever the grain, or straw, is needed.

Now, if we could just enlarge the binders and mechanize stooking and stacking we'd have the ideal harvesting system at a fraction of current costs! Anyone want to buy a combine? BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.

Look for trouble on the farm front as new countries join the EU

by NORMAN DUNN

Of course, there have always been difficulties when new members squeeze their way into the Club of Europe, and most are caused by the farming sectors. Europe may be small, but each national farm structure has always regarded itself as unique and this often brings trouble when the Commissioners in Brussels try to impose their EU structures and regulations, such as completely free trade between member countries.

It's well known that farmers everywhere tend to distrust politics and politicians. But here in Europe there's no denying that, in those countries where the farming industry has had the backing of clever and imaginative national politicians when joining the EU, then it almost always survives in its original structure.

Take Austria. When this Alpine republic joined the EU in 1995, it was rightly proud of its network of traditional family farms and self-sufficiency in meat, milk and other commodities. At that time there were around 220,000 farms with an average size of 37 acres. But would these units survive without the protection of the former border tariffs against cheap food imports?

The politicians in Vienna got to work immediately. Using EU financial support, organic farming was encouraged as one way of securing higher incomes for smaller farms. Just before joining, there were some 13,000 organic farms. By last year, the number had topped 20,000, representing just under nine per cent of all land farmed in the country.

Other farm support schemes brought more Brussels cash into the country in environmental and wildlife protection programs. Austrian farmers, for instance, were paid for maintaining or establishing hedgerows. These strategies have so far saved the family-run businesses of the Austrian countryside.

Credit for this rescue operation must also go the Austrian consumer. Based on experience in Germany, the fears were that customers would buy on price and not emotional considerations like patriotism or care of the countryside. These fears proved unfounded. The majority of Austrian consumers supported their home farms. There was indeed a drop in farms in the subsequent years. But, at five percent, this was nothing like the collapse expected. As a comparison, the number of farms in France dropped by 7.5 per cent between 1995 and 1997 and in Denmark by eight per cent.

But back to the present newcomers. Farmers in Eastern European countries, such as Poland, are in a much more difficult situation. The survival of two million Polish farmers as food producers on their own land is much more at risk. An estimated one million of these can hardly be counted as farmers in Western European terms. Their units average just five acres. But many families on such holdings -- and on much larger ones -- have no additional income and so their existence depends on the food they can grow.

Even for the other million on the land, the average holding is just 19 acres although, in the more fertile areas, go-ahead young farmers helped by government grants have raised farm size averages to nearer 50 acres. Good land just now costs the equivalent of from $750 Can to $1200 per acre and rent is $90 to $100 per acre for good wheat-growing fields. Across the border in Germany $15,000 an acre is still a reasonable price for corn-growing land, and the price increases the further west you move into Holland and Belgium.

No one needs to be a genius to realise what could happen to many of these millions on the land when Poland joins the EU and the free-trade floodgates open up. Just-now, there's some protection. Standing laws allow no foreigner to buy land. Joint ventures can be created, however, and it's no surprise that there are an estimated several thousand Western European farmers now working Polish land under such agreements.

But Poland has clever politicians too. Recognising the precarious position of its farmers, the government has negotiated a law forbidding free-market sales of farmland to foreigners for at least 18 years after joining the EU. Many smaller farmers see this protection as their only chance of keeping their businesses in the family at least for the short term. Brussels doesn't like these sorts of barriers to free-market business, however. There are already signs that pressure is being put on Poland to reduce this waiting period. Only last month the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw suggested it be reduced to a maximum 12 years.

The result was a near-revolution with members of "Samoobrona," the powerful union for small farmers, taking to the streets and demanding complete rejection of EU membership.

"Samoobrona" means self-defence, and this is just what its members, who represent 10 per cent of the parliamentary vote at the latest count, aim to exercise in keeping the Brussels bureaucrats at bay. One thing is certain, Austrian agriculture's struggles for survival will seem mild in comparison with the fireworks expected in Poland over the coming years. BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.