LUXIMO® ON FARM: Nigel Durdy
About Nigel
Nigel Durdy of Ninevah Farm, near Doncaster in Yorkshire left school at 16 and started work as a contractor before being able to buy some land. He now farms 1,100 hectares in partnership with his brother Adrian.
Nigel is the agronomist and sprayer operator for the business, annually spraying 4,000 ha of mainly combinable crops with his 36 m Rogator sprayer.
He has been BASIS qualified for 20 years and recalls whilst doing his BASIS training, someone told him that a farmer has up to 16,000 possible decisions to make to grow a crop, starting with the choice of field and crop, followed by all the possible options of inputs and timings.
“Fortunately a lot of it becomes second nature. I drive the sprayer, which helps me get to know the crops and the fields’ black-grass burden.”
Black-grass
The farm has a wide range of soil types with everything from blow away sand to peat, loams and boulder clay.
“We have black-grass across the farm,” says Nigel. “It has built up over the years as it has on most farms. We have some very bad fields and some not so bad. We are just having to manage with it now.”
Nigel uses stale seedbeds widely, and direct drills into these, with drilling delayed in the autumn. He said “We delay drilling as late as we dare. The better the weather, the longer we will wait.” He added, “What we have done, as most people have done, is change our cropping.”
Rotation
The rotation is no longer based on winter wheat and oilseed rape but now includes maize, winter rye, spring barley and spring beans.
“We now have a wider variation of cropping including spring crops, specifically put in to break the winter crop cycle. There is now a lot less oilseed rape (OSR), not just because of the inherent problems of growing OSR but because OSR is drilled very early and everything about it is black-grass heaven!”
Autumn 2022
A hot summer, followed by a long dry autumn until the weather broke in the second half of October, made establishing crops challenging.
“We couldn’t really do deep cultivations, we had to manage with surface cultivations down to 5 or 6 inches, it was just too hard. We got it ready in good time and went for a stale seedbed, pre-drilling, however, we got very little green cover this time because it was so dry,” said Nigel.
Drilling commenced towards the end of September, with fields Nigel felt were safe from a grass weed point of view. The bulk of the area was drilled in October with one or two fields drilled as late as he dared, in mid-November.
Spring 2023
On fields with bad black-grass problems, Nigel uses stale seedbeds, so fields are worked in the autumn and then sprayed off for another stale seedbed in the spring, after which crops are direct drilled.
Nigel said, “I have done a trial with some Luximo® on spring barley alongside the farm standard this year, however, it’s a little bit early to report on any differences at the moment.”
Looking ahead
Nigel is looking forward to using Luximo® this coming season.
“On black-grass it’s second to none,” however, he adds “We won’t be going silly with it, we will still be using IPM and trying to get the stale seedbeds and we won’t be bringing the drilling date forward, thinking we are safe.
To protect Luximo® we have got to try and work with it, as we want it to be around for as long as possible.”
