LUXIMO® ON FARM: Freya Morgan
About Freya
Freya’s father built up the farm, starting with just two pigs and a contract spraying business. The brewery, Charles Wells, rented him a farm. From then on, Freya was her father’s shadow.
She was one of the earlier female intakes at the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester and later travelled to Australia, where she worked as a combine driver.
Today, Freya is responsible for over 1,600ha across North Bedfordshire and into South Cambridgeshire along with her son Joshua who has recently joined the partnership. As well as owning and renting land, the business includes shared and contract farming agreements.
The soil is heavy Bedfordshire clays and Hanslope series clays, but the main challenge is moisture. Freya often sees rain in the forecast skirting around the farms and describes it as one of the main limiting factors.
Managing such a large acreage poses some challenges. While decisions around cultivations and crop protection are taken at field level, Freya tries to keep the number of different varieties down, to ensure storage facilities are optimised. With Weetabix, Richardson Milling Ltd and Heygates on her doorstep, Freya looks to match varietal choice with local end markets.
Rotation
This year (harvest 2023), Freya’s sown 775ha of winter wheat and, having recently taken on new land, there‘s more than her usual two or three varieties. “We’ve Siskin, Extase, Champion, Skyscraper and Dawsum but going forwards, we’ll look at sticking to Extase and need to decide between Champion or Dawsum. We try and keep it simple, especially with the limited storage we’ve got. I don’t like having to waste space,” she says.
“We've always grown spring barley because that has helped us with our black-grass control, you can grow it on heavy ground and achieve malting premiums. We normally grow winter beans in our rotation, but we have some spring beans this year due to weather issues. Including winter barley in our rotation helps us to establish winter oilseed rape in the ground early enough to get it away from the cabbage stem flea beetle.”
With the dry summer and autumn, Freya didn’t manage to drill the oilseed rape at home, but has inherited some on the new acreage she’s taken on. “It’s been a nightmare all the way through,” she admits. “Once it starts off on the wrong foot, it just carries on being a stressful crop to manage and never recovers.”
The inherited spring oats however, have been a source of inspiration, with Freya considering growing more in future as an additional break crop, helping with black-grass control and reducing the farm’s reliance on spring barley.
Black-grass
Freya takes a multi-faceted approach to black-grass control. She uses spring cropping, delayed drilling, rotational ploughing where needed, as well as chemical controls.
“These three cultural elements have been key on the ‘home farm’. Sometimes you need to plough to just ‘reset’ and completely invert the soil, but you don't want to be doing that every year,” she says.
“So, year-on-year black-grass control is really about rotation. In the winter wheat crop the focus is on late drilling. Our optimum date used to be the 5th October as that would usually let a flush of black grass come through and be sprayed off, but this is getting later.
“We’re also paying more attention to drainage - cleaning out all the ditches and sorting out any wet patches.”
Autumn 2022
Like many across the country, autumnal stale seedbeds and subsequent pre-emergence herbicides were hampered by the dry conditions, so Freya’s has more black-grass present on some fields than she would like.
“The farm we've taken on has actually got some quite bad black-grass problems in places,” she explains. “There’s also black-grass coming through on the home farm, noticeably, where there's a dip at the bottom of a slope and the land has lain wetter, after that heavy rain in March.”
Spring 2023
Freya’s mission this spring is to map all the bad black-grass patches and look at what needs to be done. “The heavy rain has packed the soil quite tight, so we will be assessing on a field-by-field basis,” she explains. “On the new block of land, we’ll be considering rotations, cultivations, variety choice and new chemistry to try and get that back under control.”
Looking ahead
Further ahead Freya will be looking at varieties again. “We're reviewing our IPM plans so I’ll be looking for those that give us a decent yield, require fewer inputs, and are fast tillering to help smother other out black-grass.
“I suspect cultivations will play a greater role this autumn. There are some fields which are completely clean, while others could do with a reset. We’ll also be looking at our drainage. The goals will be to achieve that fine firm seedbed and get the products on at the right time to try and control the black-grass.”
