Planning for your rainy day
THE bit of rain we have had in the past two weeks over a small fraction of our winter cropping zone was very ordinary.
For winter crop plants that were up, the leaves may have funnelled some moisture to the crown of the plants to encourage secondary roots to start.
Weeds, on the other hand, or should I say the large weed seed burden we have in our soils, will make an assessment that it is not enough to germinate and grow to seed set maturity and probably not germinate in large numbers at all.
Sure the soil needs to warm up, however combine our future warm soils with a big fall of rain and we could be looking at a large conglomeration of winter and summer weeds in a short space of time. I always believe these extended dry times, which may break with a large fall of rain, seem to promote every weed seed in the ground to germinate.
You can have dry-as-chips topsoil this week and in two weeks’ time with extended rain periods a massive amount of green, as in weeds, appears from nowhere.
A nice problem to have in one regard, as that is one thing we are very deficient in and that is good rain, and then preferably a follow-up significant rain pattern three weeks later would also be very advantageous.
So with winter crop planting not entirely out of the question for many of us, any residual herbicides or even herbicides with extended plant-backs need some deep consideration to maintain any winter or summer cropping options you may have.
It’s very true that weeds are only one problem on your property, however they do need controlling by some means before they set seed.
It has been fairly horrible in the past 12 months at least for farming in general, and this includes livestock owners. Cropping opportunities, surface water and paddock feed are all very short in our northern region.
So when rain does eventuate, your challenge is to capture as much of that rainfall into your soil profiles as you can.
So having a very bare cultivation paddock with no stubble or crop on it and a hard surface layer is not going to provide an easy water infiltration system.
In other words, if you get three inches of rain in an hour, much of this may run off your bare paddocks with these above parameters.
Not that we aren’t short of surface water in dams, creeks and streams, however we also need our very dry soils to have moisture in them for useful plants to grow and not a plethora of weeds.
So I suggest you consider each block on its merits before the big rain break, when it does come.
Do you need some rough primary tillage to capture this future possible heavy downpour? Do you need little trenches on the tramline planting system to concentrate a small fall of rain into a plantable seeding zone? Does that old, bare, compacted pasture paddock need a steady mechanical renovation event to improve rainwater infiltration? Do I need to patch up dams and contour banks for surface water control?
All these considerations should be looked at for maximising this elusive rain event when it does occur, to ensure your productivity and survival in our various agricultural operations.