Another alternative crop: Field beans

​Today, we continue with usual sowing tasks in our area and in Spain in general for these months. Once more time, our friend Espejo (from Chinchón) sent us some pictures… this time he had been sowing ​field beans. This crop is unknown for us because we had never sowed it… in fact, we annually sow broad beans (as you can see in this post) to eat them the best recipe is cooking them with ham. In this case, their variety is for feed.

As you will see, he uses a monogram ​seeder machine with 4 rows by Monosem firm; this machine is normally used for so​wing corn. According to his explanations, they have sowed ​field beans (whose fruit is smaller than broad beans) to enable the combine harvester performing a good job and to avoid that the harvester break them. In his area, the farmers gave up sowing them due to the old combine​s broke lots of collected fruits… he hopes not having these problems currently. This plant doesn’t suffer so much with the freeze in the winter mornings, and then this crop is a good option for cold areas.

Regarding the sowing task, the used dose is 130kg/ha sowed with a distance of 72.5cm x 12cm. The Manosem machine works really fine, and it can reach a working speed of about 5km/h. In the following pictures, after the sowing tasks, they use a discs roller to help them with the germination.

Versión en español.

Joaquín Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)

Sowing corn in Chinchón

Our follower and friend Miguel Ángel sent us some pictures about sowing corn on the geog of the Tajuña river (in Chinchón)... thank you very much. In our area nobody sows corn, so we don't have any knowledge about this crop... we'll try to speak a little about that explaining his comments. As he told us, he had to sow it again because wild boars had eaten it, so the fallow, which you can see in the pictures, isn't ideal for that. An important point is the birth of corn, so the weather must be appropriate if we don't want to have problems: it needs heat and moisture to grow in a week. If these conditions aren't satisfied here, corn will grow a month later and we may lost a lot of plants.

The seed drill used is a Monosem NG of four rows and the tractor employed is a John Deere 6200. This work is quick and the air seeder works without problems at 5.5 km/h. Corn is not very heavy so the turbine can aspire it easily. It is planted at a row spacing of 73 cm (it can be at 50, 70 or 80 cm in other areas), at 16 cm seed spacing and at 5 cm depth. He used about 80,000 and 90,000 seeds per hectare (if the corn is to silage, farmer can use to 120,000 units).

Regarding the seed used is of Pioneer brand and their varieties are the 1574 and 1758 (he used other varieties like w86, p66, d58 and y74 in other times). They are sold in bag of 50,000 seeds. He used 40kg/ha of microgranular fertilizer too which is fixed together with seed by the seed drill in the sowing process.

You can see a video from his YouTube channel.

Versión en español.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)