Swaths to save sorghum
THERE is no doubt about it, many of us in the farming community can come up with new and exciting ideas when needed.
For those of us who have sorghum crops to harvest, we are all very aware of the dry and stressful finish our crops have suffered.
These huge stress levels can lead to eventual early plant death, rather than a gradual physiological maturity to black point in our grain sorghum crops.
With this in mind, standing back and waiting for the grain moisture to come down and then watching your crop badly lodge or fall over is not easy.
I came across a former client and farmer friend down Clifton way and he saw that massive lodging problems were happening in his very profitable grain sorghum crop.
This southern Darling Downs farming area has been hit hard by the tough, long, dry time and from the few crops I have looked at, many have died and are suffering from this lodging factor.
So a dramatic problem calls for a dramatic fix, or maybe I should say an unusual fix would be closer to the point.
We have all heard of crop swathing, which is a North American term to describe the method of mowing your unharvested grain crop and placing it in a windrow.
We tend to call the process windrowing.
This windrowing practice allows the dry down of grain moisture to be much quicker and the resultant windrow – containing stalks, leaves and the grain heads or pods – is usually left for a few days to cure.
Then enter the Smales pick-up front, which is attached to your normal comb front of your header and away you go.
I know in canola crops down south that windrowing or swathing is very common to get the crop in earlier and to provide last-minute weed seed control. In the northern region I have regularly seen millet crops windrowed to facilitate a quicker harvest date and a self-ripening procedure on flaky millet crops.
So it was with great interest that I sat in the header doing the pick-up of these grain-laden windrows of sorghum.
Certainly not the fastest job on the farm, however it is much better than watching the crop lodge every which way and have no ability to recover these flat-on-the-ground plants and heads of grain.
It was without doubt a complete success in getting the grain off the paddock before it fell completely on the ground.
Sure it could have gone the other way if rain had fallen, however I suspect that for this new practice to go wrong, an awful lot of rain would have been needed to spoil this surprising good idea.
This idea has been a real winner for my farmer friend and something we could investigate in the future for lodging crops or ones infested by herbicide-resistant weeds.