Sunflower field preparation

We had the opportunity to spent a nice day with our friends Juan Fran and his son Diego. An impressive day due to the geographical location (you can see the photos and video) including the Monastery of Uclés (Cuenca) for the helpful machinery they have for their harrowing work. As we have already mentioned, visiting Uclés is always a pleasure as it is a very charming village. Besides, spending the morning sharing agricultural anecdotes with Juan Fran and Diego is always quite entertaining.

With regard to the work carried out, we will talk about the preparation of the field for the next sowing of sunflower, which will take place at the end of April and during the month of May. Let's hope for some rain much sooner as it has not rained since the beginning of January and the cereal and pulse vegetables are already in a critical situation. We do not know how this season is going to end :(

Finally, if we focus on the machinery that we saw working, we can highlight their two New Holland T7 Series, considered as ery robust and beautifully designed tractors. New Holland has a very competitive product in the T7 series. Also noteworthy is the Gil cultivator with the stone protection system based on rubber suspensions. It was the first time we had seen it in the field, and we liked it a lot, I looks very well manufactured with many details that make it a top cultivator. We are used to rubber suspensions system (we have the Ovlac Minichisel) and we always say that this suspensions system is much better than traditional system based on springs... but each farmer has to experience this in the field in order to form his own opinion.

Versión en español.

Cereals. Works until harvesting days

After sowing and sprouting, we are still working on winter cereals. The tasks to be done until harvesting are basically based on three tasks: fertilisation, compaction and weeding.  

In this post you can see our fertilisation strategy, this year we have chosen the fertiliser Marte45 from the Spanish manufacturer Medifer with a dose of 240kg/he. It is a fertiliser that we have used in several previous years with very good results and it is also the one we have found at a reasonable cost (although too expensive compared to the previous years prices). Let's wait for the rains so that the plant can absorb all the fertiliser. 

We will wait for it to rain so that the fertilizer could be taken by the soil plants. 

On the other hand, after the mulch fertilisation, we have rolled the soil to compact it. The goal is to better fix the root to the soil and the stones we have hidden in the ground so that we can have a more comfortable harvest job. For this task we have used our new roller, from the manufacturer Gaher Metalic. 

The next job, and perhaps the last one before harvesting, is to apply the necessary phytosanitary treatments to kill weeds and to take care of the plant if we detect any disease... but we will surely talk about this in another post. 

Versión en español.