In plant production, something can always go wrong. Sometimes, however, we are faced with a combination of various unfavorable events. In extreme cases, it is not known what crop we are dealing with.
- Contamination of cereal species prevents their sale.
- Heavy weed infestation in some plantations will mean problems not only with sales, but also with use for feed production on the farm.
- Shortcomings in grain preparation, but also agrotechnical errors, contribute to the fact that in extreme cases the plantation is lost in a given season.
Heavy contamination with grain broom eliminates the sale of grain
A plantation as heavily overgrown with weeds as in the title photo causes problems with sales. Even more, none of the buyers will probably decide to buy such grain. Remember that shopping centers usually assume a maximum level of contamination of 6 percent. The upper limit of unusable impurities is 2 percent. And this second category of pollutants includes, among others: weeds.
The plantation, which was supposed to be wheat, became a kind of winter mixture consisting of rye, triticale and wheat. However, the greatest share of species here is the broom. Such a combination eliminates any usefulness of the grain obtained from the plantation. Although the mixture of cereal species makes it impossible to sell, its intended use remains as feed. But such a large share of weeds invalidates the feed purpose. Before sale, the grain would have to be cleaned, but given the mixture of species, even separating the grain will not help much.
Where to look for sources of species mixture and heavy weed infestation?
What are the reasons for this state of affairs? The first thing that “catches the eye” is the heavy weed infestation, especially the wheat broom. This one dominated the plantation. It can therefore be assumed that either the herbicide treatment did not include a substance that combats monocotyledonous weeds or that the dose was too low. The third option is the appearance of grain broom resistant to selected active substances (the greatest resistance concerns iodosulfuron-methylodium and piroxisulam). Heavy weed infestation is also a result of significant thinning of the plantation, which in turn may be the result of, among others, low or even zero fertilization.
However, the sources of problems must be sought at the sowing stage. It can be assumed with a high degree of certainty that such a plantation used seed material that had not been cleaned in any way. For example, in weaker positions, with the lack of optimal fertilization, rye dominated more demanding cereals – wheat or even triticale. It may also be that the field was inadequately prepared and large losses were previously recorded during the harvest of the cereal forecrop, which resulted in the emergence of the forecrop.
Another problem will be the collection. Mowing such a plantation means that the combine harvester will spread some of the weeds after moving to another plantation.
Errors at the start remain until harvest
The grain from such a plantation will not be suitable for sowing. Of course, you can try to separate individual grains, but with such a large mix of species, thorough cleaning is almost impossible. And you must also take into account the fact that, in addition to mixing the grains, there is also the problem of the presence of grain broom, some of the seeds of which will not be separated.
This view only shows how important it is to run the plantation from the very beginning. Errors not only at the sowing stage, but even earlier, at the moment of seed preparation, remain with us until the harvest. In some cases, they may disqualify the usefulness of the plantation in a given season for any purpose.
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