Multipurpose spring crop
Fine-tuning agronomy for growing good millet
WINTER is basically gone and the season ticks over to what we call spring.
The time when soils warm up to the magical 15-degreesand-rising temperature that history suggests we can plant summer crops into.
However, we do tend to push the crop choice envelope to where it suits us, or should I say to when the rainfall is large and effective enough.
So with unpredictable storm rain events starting to occur, we have myriad planting options providing seed is available.
There is plenty of conjecture that our traditional grain sorghum seed is in short supply, as will many other summer crop seed, like the increasingly popular millets.
For an important and pivotal crop that has been around for nearly 10,000 years in human and animal consumption, millets could be and have been previously a real saviour for our farming fraternity.
They certainly are multipurpose, as they were all those thousands of years ago, and our current planting intentions of the various millet species could be for grain to go to our traditional birdseed market, as an overseas export grain for human food/alcohol production, or for a local multipurpose grazing grain or hay crop.
The latest use for millet is as a cover crop to give us soil or ground cover for water infiltration and soil structure/erosion protection.
Certainly, millets have been planted in some tough conditions because of their very economical cost to plant, with approximately 500,000 seeds per kilogram, and their ability to handle everything from livestock grazing to grain or hay crops in our Australian conditions.
So, agronomically they need a soil temperature around that 14 to 15 degrees at the preferred shallow seeding depth of around 3-4cm.
Seed-to-soil contact is very important and, as we see with press-wheel actions, our narrow row spacing in our millet crops do need some soil compression with a post-plant mechanical roller implement.
Nutrition is very much a forgotten subject, however after many literature searches by Bede O’Mara and myself, we need about 70kg per hectare of nitrogen to grow a tonne per hectare of millet grain.
However, as we know with nitrogen particularly, but even with phosphorous and potassium also, our efficiency of distribution and uptake can be very poor to medium for various crops and soil types.
Plenty more to know about fine-tuning your agronomy for growing a millet crop for whatever your purpose.
More on spring planting next week.