The Techniques for Landing £48.55/t Variable Costs for Malting Laureate - IX Ltd

Key Factors 

• Nitrogen applied whilst drilling.  

• Field mapping and targeted rates.  

• Monitoring emerging varieties.  

Simon Gent has been Farm Manager at IX Ltd, near Salisbury Plain, for almost 30 years, overseeing 1,700 acres of predominantly arable land on chalk downland. The farm is divided into five crop blocks, including 120ha of spring barley, 120ha of oilseed rape, peas (soon switching to oats), and two blocks of winter wheat. With 50ha dedicated to water meadow and herbal lay stewardship schemes, the farm also supports local biodiversity, hosting nesting curlews monitored by the RSPB. Luke from YAGRO visited Simon to learn more about their operation... 

You’ve won our spring barley award with a smashing variable cost of production of £48.55/t, but have grown spring barley beneath market median for many years in a row – What's your secret? 

The key is being blessed in this area by our soil. The soil lends itself to producing high yielding malting barley crops, which helps with our cost of production.

We’ve managed to reduce our fertiliser from 150kg/ha to 130kg/ha in recent years. Another change has been introducing nitrogen right in front of the drill and mixing it in. Before that, we were waiting to apply N after tramlines had emerged – but if you got a dry spring, there was the risk of N not being taken up.  

We keep our spring barley cultivation flexible. For this award-winning crop we did plough the land, mostly as blackgrass control as we’re under a lot of pressure. Otherwise, we use our Farmet Fantom Cultivator which goes down between 5 – 20cm in depth. 

Nothing is direct drilled. Our method is to cultivate in some form, spread the fert, followed immediately by a tine drill which mixes the nitrogen in with the seed.   

You won our 2024 award with 8t/ha, but you hit 9t/ha for spring barley back in 2022. Super yields... 

Interestingly, with all the grey chalk on the western side of the farm, I noticed one area was yielding around a tonne less than our farm average. So, we had all the farm mapped using SOYL, and where the soil was classed as low productive chalk, we – with help from the team at SOYL - made the decision to raise our seed rate from 350 to 500 s/sqm in those areas.

Initially, this raised the yields but made the specific weights poor and nitrogen levels low. 

Therefore, the next year, we created a nitrogen plan based on our new SOYL map. The decision was made to add 20-30 kg/ha of nitrogen on those areas, which evened out the field performance and raised our farm-level yield. And we continue to perform this on a field by field, targeted basis.  

How important would you say data is for making decisions on your farm?

Incredibly. I can clearly see the data on how we’ve improved our yields, for example. 

Using data has helped us mitigate our ryegrass problems, and to monitor our spend around herbicide where we have resistance problems. Tracking costs is incredibly important. 

I ask as you underwent extra analysis with us at YAGRO - It was a study on herbicide efficacy to support a decision for a robotic hoe grant. How did that go? 

Yes, we’re trying to access a grant to invest in machinery for culturally controlling ryegrass, and wanted some data to support this. 

We found all the extra spend on our wheat came to around an extra £100/ha on herbicide in efforts to control ryegrass. The data pointed this out clearly. So, we were able to calculate offsetting this against the cost of the hoe, in addition to potentially being able to apply for an SFI too. 

Off the back of the analysis work we put forwards for the grant and used this as supporting evidence. 

A recent change you made to your spring barley was variety choice, switching from RGT Planet to Laureate. Why the switch?  

We’re fortunate to have RL/NL spring barley trials on the farm, so I get to check how varieties are performing on our specific farm.  

RGT Planet and Laureate hit the market roughly the same time. But in our location, there seemed to be more demand for Laureate. And also Laureate has better wet-weather disease scores which is a big factor.  

In 2024, you spent slightly more on fungicide and herbicides compared to 2023. Was this in response to pressure, wet weather...? 

For fungicide, we splashed out on Miravis by Syngenta. As it was such a wet season, this certainly helped us achieve better yields – but was at a cost due to it being a brand new fungicide.  

Ryegrass is our main problem, which has appeared in the last 5 years. We never sprayed for it before. We first saw it present in an oilseed rape crop and thought we could control it with Centurion Max, but it didn’t touch it. Now, we must be very vigilant moving around the farm and ensuring the machinery is clean.  

What is your approach to balancing yields, costs and quality?  

I’d say yield is still key to us – as that brings down all our variable costs.  

Over the years, spring barley has probably been more profitable than our wheat crops. It certainly was this year, as it yielded almost as much as the wheat.  

And you were drilling spring barley as late as April in 2024? 

We were drilling from 30th Jan to Mid-April last year, yet we saw very little drop off in yield. Achieving towards 8t/ha from April drilling which is almost unheard of.  

For the later drilled areas, which were seed crop, we applied nitrogen-sulpher in one dose and a second dose of nitrogen all into the seed bed. So we made an extra pass, but I was afraid of the weather going dry after drilling. And it paid off. 

Awesome. What’s next on the horizon for yourself and IX Ltd? 

Well, hopefully getting that grant for our robotic hoe! The analysis project we took part in at YAGRO supported the grant application and we’re looking forward to the outcome.  

Congratulations once again to Simon Gent at IX Farm Ltd for winning our Best in Field Award 2024 for spring barley and best wishes for the upcoming season!