The Argument About Drilling Dates

Drill winter wheat in mid-September and you get a longer growing season, better establishment and a higher yield potential. Drill it in late October and you lose some of all three.

You also lose a very large amount of blackgrass, because most of it germinates in that window and can be killed before the crop goes in.

Blackgrass resistance costs a mean of £155 a hectare on infested English wheat fields — roughly fourteen per cent of the potential gross margin, according to work published in Nature Sustainability by Rothamsted and ZSL across a hundred and thirty-eight fields. Across the UK that is around four hundred million pounds and eight hundred thousand tonnes of wheat a year.

So the yield you give up by drilling late is smaller than the yield blackgrass takes if you drill early. It is not a close call on infested ground, and it is the single biggest arable margin lever available on this farm.