Stuart Barden in Kenya

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Barley harvest and Planting

 The Above photo is of harvesting the 60kg ha of seed planted trial, the next run on the left of the photo is the 30kg planting rate, the barley yielded just on 2t ha, with the 30kg ha seed planting rate out yielding the 60kg by 8% and also out yielding the 90kg seed planting rate by 15%.
Just looking at the crop prior to harvest I would have backed the 60kg rate, I guess that's why we need trials. The Barley missed the benefit of some out of season rain that fell in the firts half of Feb, so it effectively did not have any rain for 8 weeks prior to maturity.
                                                      The above is the 60kg ha seed rate
 Into our grain bay with the Barley, I am in the harvester when I took this photo using the 9m front to pick up the barley and run it through the machine again, I just took the drive off the knife and made the necessary changes to the sieves ect,when you don't have a grain cleaner there is not much option. It did a pretty good job,not perfect although it was good enough to go through the planter.
The team are using our 400lt cement mixer to apply a fungicide and insecticide in 160kg batches, it took a couple of days although it was very well coated.
The next day, we were out planting Barley into our other field that was harvested last Sept (sorghum) and left fallow to accumulate moisture, it is a very full moisture profile now and we are planting on paired 200 mm rows with 750mm between the center and next pair.
I planter during the day and Samson at night,we just got caught with 50 ha unplanted when we had 60mm over two nights,still the majority is in, just have to hope we can get the last little bit in soon.