The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Scottish farmers faced with parched crops
Farmer no stranger to effects of drought as he compares results in Scottish fields to the ones in southern Australia
As a long-established farmer in southern Australia, Jimmy Cochrane is no stranger to drought conditions.
But when he returns to his other farm near Kirkcaldy every summer, he expects rain, green fields and the prospect of higher yields than anything he can achieve back home.
This year is different. Banchory Farm’s crops of barley and wheat is drought-stressed and dying, like most other arable fields in central Scotland.
Mr Cochrane, who grew up in Fife, farms 5,000 acres inland from South Australia’s coast, with 10,000 Merino sheep, 400 Angus cows and 1,200 acres of wheat, barley and oilseed rape – the same crops as those produced at Banchory Farm by his manager, Craig Norrie.
“Back in Australia we don’t even try to compete with the yields we can achieve in Fife, and we certainly can’t get anything near them with wheat.
“The crops are sown in May and harvested in December, and if we get rain in September and October we can get good crops,” he said. “A good crop of wheat back home is two tonnes to the acre – we’re happy with that.
“With barley we can get two tonnes quite often and we can sometimes get up to a tonne and a quarter with rape.”
However, the pressure to improve yields is just as intense in the Southern hemisphere, and The Courier’s articles which have followed Banchory Farm’s YEN project have been making waves in the Australian farm press.
“My Australian accountant showed me The Courier’s articles about last year’s yields in Fife,” he said.
“I was surprised that field had done so well because it never looks particularly special.
“I’m certainly not getting excited about yields here this year when there has been so little rain.”
Nickersons seed specialist, Douglas Bonn, whose company is sponsoring the YEN project at Banchory Farm, said head counts in the field were far from what he’d like to see.
“In Scotland, crop management is structured to deal with relatively high rainfall,” he said.
“We apply fungicides to battle against disease but there’s no disease pressure when it’s so dry.
“The crops are clean, but water stressed.”
Craig Norrie added that while everyone recognised the yield potential had been lost, he was still hoping for a decent harvest.
“Everything we have done, such as using variable rate fertiliser, should mean it’s above average,” he said.
“It’s looking like an early harvest so from a workload point of view we’re having discussions with our agronomist about whether to spray the wheat off and cut it before the barley, because if it’s all ready at the same time there won’t be enough hours in the day.”