Growing field beans before spring barley can cut the barley's fertiliser use and environmental impact and, in most years, raise its yield, according to an analysis of long-running research at the Hutton Institute's Centre for Sustainable Cropping (CSC) at Balruddery Farm near Dundee, Farmers Weekly reports. Scientists compared spring barley grown after field beans with barley grown after barley.
Synthetic nitrogen fertiliser for barley following beans was reduced by an average of 22kg/ha, said Dr Cathy Hawes, who leads research at the CSC, and pesticide use, another large part of a crop's environmental footprint, can also be substantially lower after beans.
Across five two-year cropping periods, putting beans first reduced the environmental impact of barley production in four. Averaged across the sequences, the impacts fell by about 25%.
There was a productivity gain too: in four of the five years, spring barley after beans yielded on average 1.2t/ha more than barley after barley. The researchers caution that beans do not guarantee a better crop. In the unusually dry conditions of the 2022 barley season, barley after beans yielded less than barley after barley, and the study suggests that weather, particularly temperature and humidity, and how well the bean crop itself performed strongly influence the benefit to the cereal that follows.
The findings matter most in Scotland, where spring barley underpins the brewing, distilling and livestock industries, and the study concludes that wider use of bean-barley sequences could deliver substantial greenhouse-gas reductions.
The report is by Richard Allison for Farmers Weekly.
Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Farmers Weekly
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