Letter from Europe: Light and fresh air - Rx for higher yields

Monday, October 5, 2009

Pioneering farmers in Britain and the Netherlands are finding that both plants and animals perform better in bright and airy conditions.

by NORMAN DUNN

Plenty of light and fresh air. That was the prescription that family doctors used to bring to the farmhouse when visiting sick kids.

Nowadays, in Europe anyway, doctors who actually leave their surgeries to visit homes are mostly a thing of the past. But there's the beginning of a revival for daylight and fresh air as remedies against disease and depression. And there are a few pioneers taking this dictum straight onto the farm for more performance from crops and cattle.

Take a walk over the fields at Ian Davidson's 520-acre farm near Oldmeldrum in northeast Scotland and you'll see barley grown with 25 centimetres between the rows, every second spout in the drill having been blocked-off.

Result: This farmer says that the extra light and air circulation around the growing crop offers a better margin. Even with the seeding rate slashed by half, the final yield is often just as good, he says, and there's less disease pressure.

Ian, who's airy ideas on plant health were highlighted at the Scottish national "Croptech" crop growing demonstrations on his farm this summer, also uses conventional spacing with some of his barley and introduces another idea to make sure there's maximum exposure to the elements for the grain-bearing heads. In some of his fields, he grows barley blends with varieties chosen so there's a marked difference in height at maturity. Again, grain sizes are larger and fungicide use is reduced.

Growing different varieties together presents little difficulties in Ian Davidson's business because all grain is grown for feeding his swine unit, which fattens the offspring of 320 sows.

That's maybe why he's even tried winter barley/winter wheat blends as well.

Late-ripening winter barley and very early winter wheat varieties are chosen so that both components are ready for harvest at the same time. What happens is that the barley grows above the wheat to begin with and gets a larger share of available sunlight. When the ears fill out, they bend over and let all light and more air into the wheat heads. Yield here is expected this year to be around four tonnes per acre.

Ian's winter canola fields are also getting the "more light" treatment – at least in trial areas. The crop is sown conventionally and then, in January, 45-centimetre strips are burnt out with a band sprayer leaving 25-centimetre rows of crop. This might sound crazy, but the results so far prove it is all worthwhile. Come spring, the crop grows rapidly, with even those huge row gaps closing by mid-May. Before that, the extra light means side branch pods fill out much better and overall yield is up by around 10 per cent in the end.

Incidentally, Scotland appears to be the cradle of development for cereal varietal blends, for even the renowned Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) is doing trials of two, three and even six-variety blends of barley with yield improvements of up to 15 per cent and much less disease pressure during last year's trials.

Take a ferry almost directly southeast from the SCRI's trial fields near Dundee and you'll land in the Netherlands, where another angle on the effect of light on yield is being successfully applied. This time, it's milk output that's being boosted with dairy herds housed in very open barn designs first developed in North America.

The plastic-roofed "Serrestall" barns have simple netting as side walls. This means they're relatively cost-efficient: at around C$10,000 per cow place, including free stalls for the cattle and lighting, drainage, etc.

"We reckon the plastic-clad barns cost from two-thirds to just half the cost of conventional brick, cement and wood buildings here," says Dutch dairy farmer Jordan Oostdam. With his wife Yvonne, he runs a 115-milker herd near Rotterdam. Cow numbers are currently being expanded towards 130 head. Their Serrestall steel-frame barn, 50 metres long and 40 metres wide and roofed with 0.9 millimetre opaque white plastic sheeting, was completed in 2007. Barn sides are walled with 5x4-centimetre mesh windbreak netting, and roller blinds are also fitted on the building sides for protection against frost or high wind

This light-flooded concept is aimed at boosting milk yields by six to eight per cent, based on research done in the Netherlands. The barn builders in that country are following this light bonus up by working closely with the Dutch veterinary group "Vetwise" to design the interior layout so as to maximise this effect, and high-intensity lamps are fitted to allow this philosophy to be continued into the darker winter months.

This enthusiasm for more light in farm production seems to have really got off the ground in the last few years with the extra yields they offer at no cost really attracting farmer-attention in these tight times. BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.