Situation at eAgronom Demo Farm: spring made us change plans

The trial fields of the eAgronom Demo Farm, where winter oilseed rape and cover crops were sown last summer, have melted and the spring is here. In order to give an overview of the situation on the field and plans for the coming season - it's time for a short summary!

What happened to direct drilled winter oilseed rape?

Winter oilseed rape was one of the main crops planned for season 2024 in our test field. We sowed the variety “Trinity” on 4th of August at a rate of 3 kg/ha. We did most of the sowing with the direct drill Horsch Avatar, but a small part of the field was also sown with the agrodrone XAG P100. Oilseed rape germinated relatively evenly in both areas and the plants grew large leaf rosette due to the long and warm autumn. Fortunately, plants’ growing point had not lengthened so we assessed the condition before winter good and predicted that the overwintering will be successful.

Winter oilseed rape sown with an agrodrone. When spreading the seeds on soil surface, a 100% soil to seed contact cannot be achieved and therefore germination can be a bit uneven.

Unfortunately, the very low temperature at the beginning of the year and the lack of snow cover was detrimental to most of the plants. So we faced similar challenges as many other farmers in Estonia - we had to figure out what to plant instead of terminated oilseed rape. Our goal is to keep spring costs minimal and replace oilseed rape with another break crop. 

Like on many other fields in South Estonia, we also had only a few plants left after the winter.

Cover crops were terminated as planned 

The cover crop mixture of phacelia, buckwheat and peas, as well as white mustard are species that do not survive the winter and thus there were only residues of plants on the field by spring. The success of weed control by cover crops depends on the quality of establishment. If the plant cover has been dense enough in the fall and suppressed the weeds properly, it is generally not necessary to carry out additional weed control in the spring. Since we decided to replace oilseed rape with field pea in our field and pea’s competitiveness with weeds is relatively low, we decided to do additional weed control with glyphosate in the spring.

White mustard grew over 130 cm tall.

In the spring, only long dead stems of the white mustard plants remained.

What will happen next?

In the spring of 2024, we plan to sow different field pea varieties to our field in order to have the next autumn's crop rotation in place. Since the field had previously had several years of cereals grown on it, it was not possible to sow cereal crops there this year. Therefore, this year is a transitional period in order to get the rotation in place.

We also plan to sow white clover to one of the fields and start experimenting with permanent understory. In addition, we want to test different herbicides in pea fields to evaluate their effectiveness in weed control. We will use the Horsch Serto direct drill. 

We are also conducting an experiment on the effect of different soil cultivations on one part of the trial field. We divided one 4-hectare field into three (approx. 1.3 ha size) plots, which we will cultivate in different ways - one of them will be plough-based, the second will be minimal cultivation, and the third one will be no till system.

Taking soil samples with a soil auger.

This spring, we took soil samples from the field to determine bulk density, pH, organic C, P, K, Ca and Mg levels. Analysing bulk density and organic C content is necessary to find the carbon stock of a given field and evaluate its change after 5 years. We sampled for pH, P, K, Ca and Mg to assess the need for liming and fertilization.

Watch also a summary video made from pictures that were taken during the day!

You can read more about our demo farm and other experiments and their results here.

Until the next reports from the eAgronom Demo Farm!