What precautions should growers take around, you know, drilling depth or, or, or the application timing of that herbicide?

Yeah.

There's a few things to keep in mind, I suppose, really, and I suppose, look, it all starts off with residual herbicides obviously work different to contact herbicides, so they generally form the film or layer on the soil surface.

But they can be taken up in different ways by the weeds.

Like say something like DFF can be taken up by that emerging shoot.

You know, we often see that sort of bleaching effect on the weeds afterwards.

And other herbicides then are taken up by the roots.

But w- I- in a general sense, where there's maybe low or, or maybe a threat of some of them, uh, around the field, what's the best approach?

There's a lot there on the day, but coming back to maybe the soil cycle project, that's been launched, but why should tillage farmers be paying attention to this at all?

As I said, it's an EIP funded project and it's, I suppose, the key objective, just to say that, it is to increase the adoption of in-crop, that's in-crop organic manure application to tillage crops.

So this project is a little bit different than maybe people would be used to seeing from Chagas in the sense that These EIPs, they're very much farmer-led.

So we basically, you know, teamed up with farmers who are already applying slurry, organic manures in crop.

And then we're building on kind of what they're doing through kind of on-farm validation, I suppose.

And then, you know, we, I suppose, are trying to answer some of the questions then that other farmers have through the project, you know.

But I suppose really the nub of it is opening up this window to winter cereals because like last year half of the cereal area was actually planted in the autumn so that's that's not open to slurry because we can't put slurry out in the autumn because you know we put out more nitrogen than the crop needs and of the environmental side of it so You know, this is the big one.

How do you expect that to go?

And Ciarán, with that in mind, in terms of having the right conditions there, should growers consider applying some fertiliser as a kind of a starter fertiliser to the OECD to kind of get it up and running?

Yeah, I think so.

Now, there's a couple of things, really.

I suppose oilseed rape, of all the crops that we could sow in the autumn, is the most efficient to utilise nitrogen.

So I suppose if you have had lower yielding crops or lower than expected yields this year, maybe relative to the amount of fertiliser you put out, nitrogen you put out this year, there may be somewhat of a soil nitrogen reserve, which can help the oilseed rape a little bit.

But I think organic manures really, and I know not everybody will have access to organic manures, but if you do, you know, there's a lot of advantages to organic manures.

Firstly, it will help the establishment of the crop.

So given those really dry seed beds, are we likely to have less problems with slugs and maybe more problems with some of the other problematic weeds to have in England, such as cabbage stem flea beetle or that kind of thing?

couldn't say the six rows were you know didn't fill out as well or that kind of thing in a two rows outperformed or anything like that i

don't think you could say that there obviously would might be a bydv tolerance thing which we'll come to in a second uh helping but um but but no i i i don't think variety is is is a big one in what i'm seeing anyway but look as i said massive variation like i spoke to you know a good few people in you know ahead of this call and like you know I was talking to one advisor yesterday who's covering a big area you know down around South Cork and that like and you know he's talking about 3.1 3.2 of an average of guys he's talking to and you know I talked to another guy then yesterday and two lads and they're talking about closer to three and a half of an average so there's just just a wild variation I find it very difficult to put an average on the harvest at the south at the moment, but in the south, but I would say, I don't know, guessing maybe somewhere 3.4, I guess.

But, you know, I suppose the other thing we must factor in, and Shea said it there, is the low moistures.

Like, an awful lot of that barley came in at 11 and 12 percent moisture so like if you were saying if we just set an average of 3.4 or 12 percent like typically you know say winter barley might be harassing around 16 percent for argument's sake like that's 3.56 so there's a lot of you know a lot of our yield got lost in in that as well or if you just did the 3.4 even up to 20 percent you're talking about three and three quarters like so you know certainly the no moisture is is is a factor as well you know

so karen we have an idea do we where the higher yields came out of and what factors do you think um contributed to the higher yields that you were hearing from

Yeah, I'm going to go back a small story.

Like when I was an advisor in Cork with Eamonn Lynch.

Eamonn was a great tillage advisor at Middleton.