World record wheat crop in UK

Update on the world record wheat crop - the Lamymans (see below) were just pipped by the Smiths, in Northumberland - 15.64 tonne per hectare compared to 15.6 tonne (below).

http://www.agrii.co.uk/blog/northumberland-team-claim-new-world-wheat-record-with-master-seeds-crop-of-dickens/

Summary of the Dickens Crop -

·         330 seeds/m² (185 kg/ha) with fluquinconazole at T(-1) sown on September 22

·         300 kg/ha each of TSP and MOP after variable P&K to even-up soil indices

·         Post-em AMG and broad-leaf herbicide + insecticide + Nutriphyte PGA

·         310 kg/ha total N plus balancing S (on top of 140 kg/ha available N from the soil)

·         Four nitrogen fertiliser splits, two of stabilised urea

·         Four main fungicide sprays – including SDHIs at T1 & T2.

·         Little and often four spray PGR programme from T0

·         Foliar Mn, Cu, Zn, B and Mg strictly to tissue analyses

·         820 ears/m2 and 36 grains/ear in July

·         16.52 t/ha dry yield at 82 kg/hl specific weight

The slightly poorer Lamyman crop story -

http://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/wheat-yield-world-record-shattered-in-lincolnshire.htm

The website describes how the crop was managed, but does not mention rainfall, so that is obviously not of concern to them. Nitrogen used was 330 kg a hectare plus foliar sprays, and obviously this would have helped.

The same farmer also produced the world record oilseed canola crop -

http://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/world-record-oilseed-rape-yield-smashed-in-lincolnshire.htm

The economics of all this would be interesting.

Our productivity crisis

An ag econs seminar in Perth last week compared Australia's farm productivity growth with that of Canada. This was part of a more specific talk comparing our grain supply chain with Canada's. Taken alone, this information probably constitutes a "crisis" for Australian farmers.

From 1981 to 2012, Australia's wheat yields have improved by 12 kg per hectare a year, compared to Canada's 33 kg figure. A large part of this may be due to climate change that has benefited Canada, but reduced Australian yields. Also, some of this improvement, at least for Canada, has come from improved wheat varieties, which has been delivering 0.7 per cent improvement a year ( Farm Weekly, September 29th, 2015) - which is probably what I think the Australian genetic improvement.

Another comparison I dug up, after seeing these figures, was from some economists (Nossal and Sheng, 2013), that compared "total factor productivity" for agriculture in Australia, Canada and the United States -

The warning from the seminar was that Australia needs to act to protect farming industries.
I would also add that our productivity has deteriorated in recent years - though not just because of climate change and poorer seasons.

Our solution will start with putting the problem on the table. We can no longer pretend that our research and development institutions are delivering the productivity we should expect. I believe this problem has arisen from "out-sourcing" of farm R&D to professionals, and we need to re-engage farmers in the process.

For starters, the best way for farmers to measure progress, is to take seasonal factors out of the judgement about what is a good crop, by using Water Use Efficiency calculations.

Another current gripe is the short term focus on profit - one year at a time. Because of this, we have neglected a major limitation on yield for most farms, in liming. I suspect most farms would have other opportunities to lift yield and productivity that would become immediately obvious from water use calculations.

However to go beyond what we already know, but are not doing, we will need to develop better crop monitoring than we have come to expect over recent decades.

A cash-in-the-bank example of Water Use Efficiency

The concept of Water Use Efficiency is not easily visualised, as illustrated by the industry virtually ignoring it for the last thirty years. So, in an attempt to demonstrate how it can help in a real way, I presented a paper to the 2015 Crop Updates -

http://www.giwa.org.au/pdfs/CR_2015/SORT/W16_Rees_David_Water_Use_Efficiency_to_improve_farm_budgeting_Paper_CU15W16_.pdf

This is case study of only one farm, but at least is a starting point to show how Water Use Efficiency calculations can help a farm business.

Water use efficiency - a research triumph?

Recent (May 2015) publicity from AEGIC - the Australian Export Grains Innovation Centre claims  farmers have doubled water use efficiency (WUE) over a thirty year period -

http://www.grdc.com.au/Media-Centre/Ground-Cover/Ground-Cover-Issue-116-May-June-2015/WUE-data-measures-an-industry-triumph


and this is considered a "triumph".
But the "glass half empty" view is that the graph in the report shows that WUE has stalled since about 1995, though it did improve from 1980. This plateau is now recognised at least by farm economists. 
Even more alarming should be the a likely delay between an idea for innovation to improve productivity, and implementation.
A positive should be that consulting agronomists now number some 2,300 across Australia, according to Mick Keogh and the Australian Farm Institute. This effort should be assisted by digital communications that we now have and that could not have imagined three decades ago. 
Yet despite these positives, the plateau in productivity improvement remains. A good start to fixing a problem like this would to confront it, with the right interpretation. 

Soil and big data

A recent conference in Canberra was titled "Soil and Big, Data and the Future of Agriculture", and was summarised in the Land -
http://soilbigdata.org/blog/blog/the-dirt-on-soil-data
In some ways, the idea is on the right track, and Barnaby Joyce is throwing $1.5 million at the project through CSIRO.
But somehow we have been missing something with this sort of approach. How could our productivity have been improved so successfully until about 25 years ago, then stalled since?
My most recent example has been research into liming. Questions are being asked about why the W.A. wheatbelt has not adopted what was advised decades ago, to hold soil pH at 5.5 (CaCl2 measurement). Yet during this time, there is no credible economic case that it would pay for farmers to adopt this suggestion. The assumption seems apparent that researchers say it should happen, so it will.
The liming example may be an isolated exception, and of course, such contentions would naturally be strongly contested by administrators of our R&D systems. However over the past few years, I have collected enough evidence to support my argument. The debate now should be whether to present and debate such arguments, or instead to implement a way to do the job better.
So good luck to Barnaby with his system, but I will need more than just luck to gizump Barnaby's $1.5 million.

The family business

An article in the Harvard Business Review describes how family businesses can make better decisions. The idea suggested is that the business should be considered like a family home, with different rooms for different purposes. The business should therefore have rooms for -
- the owner room
- the board room
- the management room, and
- the family room.
"  Discrete decisions are made in each room: management directs operations; the board monitors the performance of the business and hires/fires the CEO; owners set the high-level ownership goals for the business and elect the board; and families build unity and develop family talent – to name just a few of the most basic decisions made in each room."

No two family farm businesses are the same, but this idea may help deal with the inevitable conflicts between business and family interests.
The full article can be accessed by signing up for the Harvard Business Review, with a free subscription.

If no luck with Lotto, try Farming Simulator

From my U.S. contacts, here is the old joke about farming come to life. The farmer who won Lotto was asked about his plans -"just keep farming until it is all gone".
This app gives you the chance to do that in the virtual world - Farming Simulator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhkUmOViC-Q

Apparently also available to would-be farmers.