ÄDELHOLM: PLANNING 2023
The 2023 sugar beet crop will be in the middle field on the southern block. It is ca 6.7 ha. Our goal with the crop at Ädelholm is to produce something very ‘standard’. There are always experiments in these fields, so we need to think of that first.
All the agricultural activity on Ädelholm is carried out by a neighbour, who has year after year delivered. This means that the available machinery and implements is somewhat fixed.
Maps
Got to love a good map. Below are some maps of the soil properties over this field. Note, these soil maps:
- are created by us in QGIS, so might look a little different to others you see. To be honest, I’m not that happy with the interpolation done here – too many instances where the values between two sampling points is outside the range of the two sampling points. In CFD (and probably other areas of mathematics), this would be called a boundedness problem.
- use a very high resolution of soil mapping. The norm is 1 sample per hectare, these maps use a sampling procedure that took 10 samples per hectare.
- look a little different to the Google map above: the below images where done in QGIS with a EPSG:4326 coordinate reference system, which tends to warp things on the y axis (i.e. the fields below look relatively much wider (East-West) than that in the Google map).
Soil physical properties
Looking at historical maps, nothing related to human activity (eg an old road) back to 1900 could be found that describes the dark strip running North-South. It doesn’t seem to show up at a different green in the more recent satellite images, either. UPDATE: Turns out that this EM38 map was the layer at depth (ca 1m), so the dark line in the above map is either a roman road or something natural. Could be fun to dig a hole there!
There is some good variation in the pH in this field. The pH in the western end of the field is low enough that it will be effecting yield. It might even be so that the high values in the eastern half can lead to other problems – (nutrient availability, redox?). Talking with our contractor, a whole lot of lime (20 t/ha) was spread on this field some 10 years back – might be time again. Looking at the old pH map on markkatering.se from 2012, there has been a general decrease in pH at Ädelholm, which is close to around 0.5 over this field.
Nutrients
Much of the area in the dark red strip in the western half of the field is in the Class II category (2,1 – 4.0). This means that the application of P fertiliser will have a big effect, but it wont be able to to compensate fully for the low levels in the soil. This means a long-term strategy to build the soil reserves in probably a good strategy. For this, an application rate of XX kg/ha is applicable. The majority of the field is in Class III (4.1-8.0), so P application up to ca ## kg/ha, which covers both harvested P and some maintenance, should pay for itself. There is not much in Class IV. In the end, the availability of P to the plant is very water dependent.
Variety
We had a bit of discussion on this. The early thought was to take the same as last year (Daphna), but after some discussion, we’ve gone with the high sugar content KWS Fabienna. I like high sugar content varieties, so I’m happy about this.