NOT wanting to panic anybody, however it is very dry in many areas and we all want and need to plant a winter crop.
I will be first to advise it is not too late to plant most of our northern winter crops, the exceptions being faba beans and probably canola.
Having observed and been part of agronomic decisions in planting times for over 40 winters, I can definitely say it is not too late to take advantage of some tremendous cereal grain end pricing and of course our original legume break crop of chickpeas.
Which brings me to my topic this week – dry planting.
By dry planting I mean planting seed without any upper soil moisture or before any significant planting rain occurs.
Much of this is done in the western and the southern parts of Australia and I have never been keen on it.
I refuse to say BUT here and will say however, there are a few farmers that I know who have actually done it or are seriously contemplating this dry plant option for this year.
Let me start with chickpeas as a lessor good option to dry plant.
The ability of chickpeas to germinate and emerge from planting depth of 150mm or more is well known.
So with inoculant survival needing a moist cool environment with nutrients and aeration, planting into a dry seeding zone is very ambitious to assume that these little root nodule bacteria will successfully form nodules, to provide nitrogen for your impending legume crop.
So unless you believe you have a background of chickpea rhizobia in the soil, the dry planting idea for chickpeas is not good and may lead to difficult management decisions in a few months time.
Last year many crops and particularly chickpeas got hammered with frosts. An early plant date and a warm winter until July really burned up the day degrees needed to get to an early flowering date, and then latish frosts and cool weather did the damage, with no leftover subsoil moisture to regenerate the crop.
Pricing for end product in chickpeas in 2018 is certainly not as attractive as previous years, however will be much better than for the last 15 year average.
Weed control is usually handled in our poorly competitive chickpea crops by isoxaflutole and a triazine product, but of course with these post plant pre-emergent products you certainly need rainfall in the vicinity of 30mm to activate in the impending weeds root zone.
Even then with our currently very dry soil surfaces, the tank mix products efficacy on weeds could still be poor.
Onto an easier decision… maybe. Wheat and barley certainly do not need inoculation or deep planting techniques, however they too will suffer at the hands of a big weed flush with post-plant rain.
Usually by this time we have had weeds emerging over the late summer and autumn time and the control methods are varied to control this flush of weeds pre-crop with a suite of knock down or residual herbicides or mechanical options.
Needless to say, hot spring conditions may not affect chickpeas, however can reduce yield in wheat and barley crops in reproductive and grain fill stages.
Over the years I have always been nervous of this dry planting caper with weed numbers per square metre being a major concern and I do wonder why I am even discussing it now.
Weeds certainly have not got any less in number or species and herbicide resistance is knocking on the door very loudly.
Also getting good balanced nutrition levels in the best soil zone has been another concern for this last very dry season, then why am I bringing it up here? I believe it is a combination of things in this day and age.
We appear to be receiving those intermittent big falls of rain each year and soil erosion is getting worse when we have little to no stubble after a few big years of chickpeas.
So the desire to get some wheat or barley as a cover crop in the ground is strong. Nearly as strong as the end pricing for wheat and barley, so that is another positive point for planting dry in a timely manner for many areas.
Another critical point is that in this summer of 2017/18 was fairly ordinary in finance income for many on us on both sides of the border with grain sorghum hectares being at very low levels. Actually the summer of 2016/17 was not much better for grain sorghum crops.
There are many debatable points for dry sowing.
Of course the weather can turn around on a dime, like occurred in late June and July of 2016 in central Queensland, where they received 100-150mm of rain and that more than doubled the hectares of chickpeas planted at that time.
Source: PAUL MCINTOSH, Rural Weekly