Worlaby Farms is situated just off the Bluestone Heath road 5 miles East of Cadwell Park, nestled within some of the prettiest parts of the Lincolnshire Wolds.
Worlaby Farms is a typical Wold farm, thin chalk soil in places on some reasonably impressive hill sides. The farm is ring fenced with a good deal of grass and woodland and offers a day’s shooting of some repute. I’m not selling the shooting but suffice to say that the farmer has achieved this yield, as he does every year, accommodating a plethora of wildlife including a good many rabbits.
Last year (growing year 2010-2011) NHCaDelta was applied on a failing potato crop on some sandy land down at Tumby, Nr Horncastle. It was very clear that we were on to something after our products recovered the droughted, un-irrigated crop from near disaster and delivered a harvest of some 25 tonnes/acre of quality ware potatoes.
Due to our previous success, Worlaby Farms was keen to use our NHDelta and 1-4-ALL products in a more intensive combinable crop regime. Their belief, given what we knew then, was that he could, with our help, produce record breaking crops of wheat across his farm. So the husbandry strategy for 2011-2012 was hatched!
During the growing season conventional nitrogen was applied. In addition the stabilized bio-available chemical nitrogen in the form of NHCaDelta and NHKDelta was foliar applied through the growing season. Along with the uptake enhancer 1-4-ALL the crops continued to grow well.
Delta enhances leaf mass and encourages good root structure and growth. Delta does not readily leach through the soil profile nor does it volatilize into the atmosphere and given the very high rainfall this year, Delta was the perfect food for the plant.
Like so many crops, the wheat at Worlaby looked exceptional all year, you could not get more ears in the field and the World Record Attempt was on!
….and then….. it rained and rained and rained, putting pay to attempts to achieve the world record breaking crop that we seriously thought was very possible! Right up to the last month of the growing season the crop looked like some sort of record would be broken, but the weather was to play one more devastating hand and more rain came and seemed to make the challenge even more difficult.
The Oil Seed Rape harvest and Barley harvest came with great success. These crops had also received the Delta and 1-4-ALL programs and the OSR ran at a little over 2 tonnes/acre.
The harvest of the wheat’s at Worlaby started the week of the 3rd September and I sat with the combine driver on four separate days and we weighed 100 acres across a weighbridge which allowed us to fully calibrate the combine yield monitor. I watched the yield monitor with interest and seldom saw the figures dip below 4 tonnes/acre.
The crop across the whole farm ran at between 73 up to 78 kg/hl and delivered an average yield of 4.1 tonnes/acre (10.12 tonnes/ha). The last field, being 35 acres in size, ran at 5.1 tonnes/acre (12.59 tonnes/ha) and was the earliest drilled on the farm on 19th Sept 2011. Interestingly the best part of that field was running at between 5.6 and 6.1 tonnes/acre (15.06 tonnes/ha) and this was the part of the field that had not been rolled in the back end.
We are devastated that no world record or UK record could have been broken this year at Worlaby, but we are all delighted that such good results have been achieved given the immense odds against such results. This is a testament, I believe, to the good farming by Worlaby and the good products supplied by us and others in the industry, whose interest is to maximise output and optimise arable husbandry.
More details of Worlaby Farms attempts to break the World and UK wheat record are now been collected and further details will be posted on this website soon.