Winter Oilseed Rape Tips

Just a short video on varieties for the sowing season.

Seeing myself on film...........yikes, never a good feeling :cry:


Do you think csfb will become more of an issue over the next few years. There seems to be a bit of an exodus from OSR across the water. How are crops on the NE trials sites comparing to your own farm, both cereal and osr?
 
Do you think csfb will become more of an issue over the next few years. There seems to be a bit of an exodus from OSR across the water. How are crops on the NE trials sites comparing to your own farm, both cereal and osr?
This is something that I’ve thinking about a lot.

The combination of our climate & lower WOSR crop frequency mustn’t suit the pest.

Traditionally, we haven’t ever had a problem with Flea Beetle in WOSR (maybe more so in SOSR), this would make me hope that we shouldn’t get the resistant one either. I only had to spray once in the last 15 years.
If we aren’t spraying the beetle, we aren’t selecting for resistant types.

The WOSR plots in Dunleer averaged 2.15tn/acre. The winter barley didn’t hit 3tn though.....
The winter wheat looks good there.

No WOSR cut here yet. Just analysing the winter barley plots here this evening. Had varieties averaging up to 5.2tn/acre......a country of extremes this year.
 
Anyone heard any prices for rape? I've been enquiring from usual few I deal with this week but no one coming back with anything.
I see it's around £360 stg green whether we get the equivalent or not.....
 
Anyone heard any prices for rape? I've been enquiring from usual few I deal with this week but no one coming back with anything.
I see it's around £360 stg green whether we get the equivalent or not.....

I heard of a price being quoted of €365 @ 9% m/c
 
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Cut the winter rape yesterday, 1.79 t/acre at between 8.3 and 9.6%moisture.
Dk expansion was the variety same as last year but yield back almost a third of a ton on last year's.
We had one night's frost of -4° three quarter way through flowering that I think done the damage, pods lower down in crop were noticeably better than higher ones.
Happy enough with it all the same given the year.
Nearly time to start ploughing for 2021s crop now
 
Finished our Expansion today. Took a fair while for moisture to drop down this morning as there was a fog in the early hours.
3rd time we’ve grown WOSR on this land. Unsure of exact moistures as yet but probably averaging about 10%.

Average across the 48 acres was 2.07tn/ac as harvested so very happy. It’s high ground so drought may have had some effect at the end of May. Plant numbers were only in the mid 20’s/m2.

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For rotation reasons 2020 was the first year in 9 that we didn't have OSR so we thankfully avoided the taxation headaches of a 2.0 t/ac crop.
Back in the game this year, finished planting yesterday, got it rolled and applied the pre-em on before last nights drizzle.
Decided to try something different this year and went for the HEAR hybrid variety Ergo at 50 seeds/m2. Chatting to a couple of growers that had it in 2020 and they're planting it again so it's worth a try.
 
Mine only done 1.7 so luckily that was a bullet that I dodged also :sweat::sweat:!!! Must try to get straw sorted before I think about planting. I’d imagine acreage will be down due to the late harvest.
 
Winter oilseed Rape plots have established well.

Sown 7th September. Just trying to decide which herbicide to use now.
Will probably go with Legion (generic Katamaran) soon and some Falcon for the barley volunteers.
Have used Astrokerb the last couple of years when we didn’t plough as it was useful to take out later emerging cereal volunteers which are more numerous when we didn’t plough.

It’s a balance, it would be nice to get the job done now while ground is firm. Waiting for Astrokerb is fine if ground stays firm during the winter and waiting till later will mean any herbicide effect on the crop will also be delayed. Both approaches are fairly equal in terms of cost.


6861FC8B-3D23-4AF6-9A35-B45AA29E4579.jpeg
 
Any sign of slugs at rape, we seem to be ok so far.
None here but we will always pellet rape once. I have tried not pelleting and just keeping an eye on it but it never was worth it. They can take it overnight and it doesn't grow back like a cereal plant might.
 
Just a short video on varieties for the sowing season.

Seeing myself on film...........yikes, never a good feeling :cry:

Just watched that there very good.
In basic language how do you "breed" different varieties?
Like how was it possible to make two varieties resistant to that disease?
 
Just watched that there very good.
In basic language how do you "breed" different varieties?
Like how was it possible to make two varieties resistant to that disease?

Thanks :smile:

A fair question. Well breeding can generally be summed up as "cross the best with the best and hope for the best".

I'm not a geneticist so I won't be overly technical.


In the case of crops, there are generally two types of breeding - conventional and hybrid.

  • Conventional

This is used for most cereals and grasses. These plants are self pollinating (each plant has a male and female part on the plant). The male part (Anther) produces pollen (like sperm) and this falls into the female part and fertilises it and hey presto you have a seed.

In the case of lets say wheat, a breeder will look at existing varieties and maybe even wild wheats and pick out those that he likes the look of. He might pick them because the produce large seeds or are resistant to a disease etc.
One plant will be chosen as the male and the other will be chosen as the female. To make one of the plants "female only" he will cut off the anthers, therefore it cannot fertilise itself. He then scatters the pollen from the other plant into it and he knows that the "female" plant can only have been fertilised by the other plant - in other words he has crossed one with the other.
The new seeds formed on the female plant are again planted and the breeder watches to see what grows. What grows will be a mix of new varieties - most useless but some may look promising. He chooses those promising ones and plants their seeds again. The seeds produced by these should then be relatively pure. He then puts them into trials to see how they compare with new varieties. Then he might give some to the likes of Goldcrop who will see if they grow ok in the Irish climate. If we chose one, we then put into Dept of Ag trials for another 3 years and at the end it may or may not become commercial.
As you can see, it takes many years to produce the new variety and the vast majority of new varieties are stopped during the process.
If a variety looks promising, the breeder will have to make sure to keep a maintenance crop of the variety each year to make sure the variety stays pure and also doesn't run out.

  • Hybrid

Similar principal as in two parents are used. However the parents are crossed each year - the seed is not remultiplied.
The reason that a fresh cross is done each year is because of "hybrid vigour" or Heterosis as it is also known. When two varieties are crossed for the first time, the progeny (children) of the cross exhibit higher vigour than their parents (this could be more power to survive tough conditions or more yield etc).
Unfortunately, when if the children are multiplied up this vigour does not re-occur. Therefore a fresh cross needs to be done each time - this is expensive.

Hybrids are used in cereals to a limited degree but they are very popular in other crops such as vegetables, oilseed rape etc.

  • Other bits
You asked about the TuYV virus in the oilseed rape video. This resistance was first identified in another brassica plant and such a plant would have been crossed with oilseed rape to transfer the resistance into oilseed rape. When this transfer occurs for the first time, other traits will be transferred to the oilseed rape. Most of these traits are negative or useless. So, once you have an oilseed rape with the desired virus resistance, you will need to keep crossing the oilseed rape plant with good varieties to come up with better oilseed rape plants that also have the desired resistance.
Sometimes, in order to speed up the process, a breeder might harvest the crop in the northern hemispehere (eg. the UK or Ireland) and then send the seeds to the southern hemisphere (eg. New Zealand) in order to get two harvests in the one year and thus speed up the multiplication of the seeds.
They will also use special glasshouses with special lighting and temperature to speed up the growth of the plants.

We hear mention of Gene editing in the press. The EU is currently re-examining Gene editing to see if it can be made legal in the EU (I think it should be made legal).
Gene editing is much more precise than the traditional methods described above. It involves adding removing genes to improve a plant.
The difference between gene editing and GM is that gene editing only involves genes from the same plant - for example wheat genes put into a wheat plant whereas with GM, tomato genes can be put into a wheat plant.

As you can see, there's a lot to it and a lot of cost also. As chemicals come under more pressure across the world, more focus has been put on genetics to provide solutions and improve yields. This has resulted in some of the traditional "chemical companies" buying or setting up new breeding programmes to move their business more towards that.
However, many breeding companies remain privately owned by families or in many cases farmer cooperatives.
Breeding is a long term game and not a game for shareholders who want a quick return on capital.

I have only grazed the surface of crop breeding here but I hope it gives some explanation.

I have always loved plants, ever since I was a child. When I was 5 or 6, I used to plant plots of crops in my mothers garden using seeds from whatever my father was planting. I used to grow them and harvest them and clean the grain using a lettuce spinner. I used to even make up "potions" with whatever chemicals I could find in the house and make my own "sprays".
I'm not sure if I ever really grew up.

You can have plants without humans or animals but you can't have humans or animals without plants.
 
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Thanks :smile:

A fair question. Well breeding can generally be summed up as "cross the best with the best and hope for the best".

I'm not a geneticist so I won't be overly technical.


In the case of crops, there are generally two types of breeding - conventional and hybrid.

  • Conventional

This is used for most cereals and grasses. These plants are self pollinating (each plant has a male and female part on the plant). The male part (Anther) produces pollen (like sperm) and this falls into the female part and fertilises it and hey presto you have a seed.

In the case of lets say wheat, a breeder will look at existing varieties and maybe even wild wheats and pick out those that he likes the look of. He might pick them because the produce large seeds or are resistant to a disease etc.
One plant will be chosen as the male and the other will be chosen as the female. To make one of the plants "female only" he will cut off the anthers, therefore it cannot fertilise itself. He then scatters the pollen from the other plant into it and he knows that the "female" plant can only have been fertilised by the other plant - in other words he has crossed one with the other.
The new seeds formed on the female plant are again planted and the breeder watches to see what grows. What grows will be a mix of new varieties - most useless but some may look promising. He chooses those promising ones and plants their seeds again. The seeds produced by these should then be relatively pure. He then puts them into trials to see how they compare with new varieties. Then he might give some to the likes of Goldcrop who will see if they grow ok in the Irish climate. If we chose one, we then put into Dept of Ag trials for another 3 years and at the end it may or may not become commercial.
As you can see, it takes many years to produce the new variety and the vast majority of new varieties are stopped during the process.
If a variety looks promising, the breeder will have to make sure to keep a maintenance crop of the variety each year to make sure the variety stays pure and also doesn't run out.

  • Hybrid

Similar principal as in two parents are used. However the parents are crossed each year - the seed is not remultiplied.
The reason that a fresh cross is done each year is because of "hybrid vigour" or Heterosis as it is also known. When two varieties are crossed for the first time, the progeny (children) of the cross exhibit higher vigour than their parents (this could be more power to survive tough conditions or more yield etc).
Unfortunately, when if the children are multiplied up this vigour does not re-occur. Therefore a fresh cross needs to be done each time - this is expensive.

Hybrids are used in cereals to a limited degree but they are very popular in other crops such as vegetables, oilseed rape etc.

  • Other bits
You asked about the TuYV virus in the oilseed rape video. This resistance was first identified in another brassica plant and such a plant would have been crossed with oilseed rape to transfer the resistance into oilseed rape. When this transfer occurs for the first time, other traits will be transferred to the oilseed rape. Most of these traits are negative or useless. So, once you have an oilseed rape with the desired virus resistance, you will need to keep crossing the oilseed rape plant with good varieties to come up with better oilseed rape plants that also have the desired resistance.
Sometimes, in order to speed up the process, a breeder might harvest the crop in the northern hemispehere (eg. the UK or Ireland) and then send the seeds to the southern hemisphere (eg. New Zealand) in order to get two harvests in the one year and thus speed up the multiplication of the seeds.
They will also use special glasshouses with special lighting and temperature to speed up the growth of the plants.

We hear mention of Gene editing in the press. The EU is currently re-examining Gene editing to see if it can be made legal in the EU (I think it should be made legal).
Gene editing is much more precise than the traditional methods described above. It involves adding removing genes to improve a plant.
The difference between gene editing and GM is that gene editing only involves genes from the same plant - for example wheat genes put into a wheat plant whereas with GM, tomato genes can be put into a wheat plant.

As you can see, there's a lot to it and a lot of cost also. As chemicals come under more pressure across the world, more focus has been put on genetics to provide solutions and improve yields. This has resulted in some of the traditional "chemical companies" buying or setting up new breeding programmes to move their business more towards that.
However, many breeding companies remain privately owned by families or in many cases farmer cooperatives.
Breeding is a long term game and not a game for shareholders who want a quick return on capital.

I have only grazed the surface of crop breeding here but I hope it gives some explanation.

I have always loved plants, ever since I was a child. When I was 5 or 6, I used to plant plots of crops in my mothers garden using seeds from whatever my father was planting. I used to grow them and harvest them and clean the grain using a lettuce spinner. I used to even make up "potions" with whatever chemicals I could find in the house and make my own "sprays".
I'm not sure if I ever really grew up.

You can have plants without humans or animals but you can't have humans or animals without plants.
Savage response I didn't think it worked like that.
I assumed it was all done by gene editing
 
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