With pulses garnering more interest across the sector, CPM finds out how growers can get the best out of these protein-packed break crops.
“Give pulses the attention they deserve and don’t just put them in the ground and hope for the best.” – CHARLOTTE WHITE
By Charlotte Cunningham
On the back of a whole industry shift towards producing more homegrown protein sources, it could be argued that pulses have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity of late.
As well as the opportunity for UK-grown protein, pulses offer significant benefits at a farm level including improved soil health, crop diversification, and when done well – economic profitability. However, successful production requires careful planning and attention to detail.
This is according to Charlotte White, senior research scientist at ADAS. “The main thing is to give pulses the attention they deserve and not just put them in the ground and hope for the best.”
As such, Charlotte says starting with drilling into the right conditions is important, as well as maintaining soil health ahead of drilling. “Peas and beans can be sensitive – peas a little more so than beans. What we’re finding is crops which are drilled earlier, stay green and grow for longer, tend to have higher yields. So it’s about encouraging and prolonging the growing period.”
She adds that avoiding stress is key too. “I know this is very difficult, but pulses are very sensitive to a lot of heat and drought, especially during flowering. So if you can get in early in the right conditions, then that’ll set you off to a good start. Drilling earlier can encourage earlier flowering so that pod set occurs when it’s cooler.”
It’s attention to detail like this that’s helping growers reap the rewards of their efforts in the Pulse YEN, explains Charlotte. “This year gave us some really good crops and yields, despite the fact that it was very wet at the beginning of the year with incredibly wet establishment and delayed sowing.”
Looking more in depth at this year’s data, Charlotte says similarities between the top three yields provide interesting food for thought when it comes to getting the best out of pulse crops. “In the beans, two of the farms had beehives in their crop and none of the others did – which I thought was quite interesting.
“The farms which had the highest yields, had outstandingly tall plants, a high number of pods per shoot and a high number of beans within those pods. They also had a high N offtake.”
These top performers also deployed a wide rotation, with a 7-8 year break from the pulses last grown in that field – wider than the recommended five years, notes Charlotte. “The take-home from that is the need to avoid a tight rotation and that spreading pulses out is likely to be beneficial in terms of performance.”
BENEFICIAL CONDITIONS
It was a similar story for the pea results, comments Charlotte. “The top three yields had a higher biomass and a high number of peas per pod. Interestingly, in both cases (peas and beans), I think the lower than average temperatures in June and July helped and encouraged flower retention and pod set.”
Longer rotations also proved beneficial for pea yields, she adds. “Two out of the three highest yielding crops were on virgin pea land and the other from a field which hadn’t grown pulses on it for more than six years.”
Among those growers who’ve reaped the rewards of careful cultivations is Richard Budd. Richard heads up Stevens Farm (Hawkhurst), a Kent-based father and son arable and fruit operation spanning 1500ha across a variety of soil types – from heavy clay to sand.
The arable rotation typically comprises winter wheat, winter barley, winter beans, oilseed rape and spring oats, and to get the best out of these crops, Richard says he’s been a part of YEN for the past eight years. “We initially became involved because it was a good metric to understand more about what our crops were doing – you won’t find an analysis service like it.
“It also allows you to nationally benchmark, so you can then compare and understand other places around the country; what people are doing, what’s working and what’s not. That network and knowledge exchange is invaluable. Yes, winning the awards is nice, but you can’t put a value on all of the information you glean every year.”
As such, Richard says he’s more interested in learning about what went wrong in his crops over what went right – and with his beans, it’s been about uncovering what leads to inconsistencies in production. “The trouble with beans is when you go online and look up how to grow them – specifically what beans require and respond to, for example – it’s pretty much a blank piece of paper.
“So for me, the idea of being involved with Bean YEN was to allow that piece of paper to start being filled in and create a blueprint of how to grow the crop so going forward, our yields would be more consistent.”
BUMPER PERFORMANCE
Looking at the impact this has had on his crops, Richard says he achieved over 9t/ha in some fields this year; the farm’s crop average sits around 5.5t/ha. “I’m not sure quite what went right and I’m still trying to work it out,” he laughs. “We had the most awful start to the spring ever – it rained ridiculously hard.”
Conditions continued until the end of March leaving crops covered in chocolate spot and looking rather ‘sad for themselves’, he continues. “But when it did finally start drying up, they just grew – I’ve never known a crop like it.”
Reflecting on why this could have occured, Richard says the cooler, damp summer helped to keep crops greener for longer. “Pollination of the crop was amazing this year too. We always put bees in our crops which I think helps, and this year it seems to have extended that assistance even further.
“Plants also podded more but consistently from top to bottom. I still don’t quite know why that was, but we’re trying to work that out at the moment – with the help of YEN – so we can replicate it again this year.”
Moving forward, Richard believes more farms getting involved with YEN will only help to strengthen national pulse performance. “The more people involved in YEN the better, in terms of getting a bigger data set so we can understand the trends and enable us to grow consistently better crops.
“I believe views towards break crops need to change. At Stevens Farms we put as much effort into growing our break crops to ensure they contribute a healthy net margin. I don’t want my business reliant on just wheat to bring home the profit – it’s far too risky, particularly as our climate changes and we have to adapt and derisk our operation. In my opinion, the best way to build resilience is to have crops contributing to the pot across the rotation,” he concludes.
This article was taken from the latest issue of CPM. Read the article in full here.
For more articles like this, subscribe here.
Sign up for Crop Production Magazine’s FREE e-newsletter here.
