- Early sowing of barley is not recommended for several reasons.
- It is worth sticking to the current sowing dates, or even slightly delaying them. The optimal dates are currently considered rather early.
Shortages will occur in the fall if it lasts long.
Barley is the fastest sown cereal among winter crops. But it is also not worth rushing too much with sowing. Everyone has their own approach to this issue, some sow this cereal as early as the beginning of September. But does such an early sowing date make sense? Not really. Let's take a look at why.
Plantations from very early sowings will produce excessive biomass before winter dormancy. This in turn will be associated with a greater risk of infection by pathogenic pathogens, which we will mention later. However, what is important – in the case of early sowing, we can observe severe deficiencies already in the autumn. Even with optimal pre-sowing fertilization, plants will rush at a dizzying pace during a long and at the same time relatively warm autumn, and the consequence of this will be dynamic uptake of nutrients from the soil. There is a risk that already in the autumn, early sown winter crops, especially barley, will feel the effects of such a high uptake in the initial period, not only in the context of P and K, but also N.
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Fast sowing means bigger weed problem
In the context of a long autumn, attention should also be paid to the problem of weed infestation. This problem concerns all winter crops, although barley in particular, because it remains the cereal crop exposed the longest during the autumn vegetation. This means that the risk of weed development also lasts longer, including secondary weed infestation even at the end of autumn (when the autumn is quite long). This situation can occur especially when the herbicide treatment is performed in the early development stages and at the same time with a fast sowing date. It turns out that such application takes place even at the end of September. If we were to follow only the previous season, we would notice that in October and November the risk of secondary weed infestation after such a fast treatment was quite high.
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Early sowing increases the risk of viruses
Very early sowing dates increase the risk of damage caused by aphids. In relation to these pests, infection by viral diseases is particularly important, which was of great importance in the previous season. It should be noted that infection with viruses was observed not only in barley (also in wheat). One of the reasons could have been long aphid raids on plantations – they appeared on them for an exceptionally wide time window. This in turn directly translated into a much higher risk of transmitting viral diseases (including BYDV, or yellow dwarf virus). In addition to viruses, there is also a greater threat of "conventional" diseases, i.e. infection with powdery mildew of cereals and grasses may be more severe. This in turn requires the implementation of solid T-0 protection, although this procedure should be performed in autumn almost every year, not only in barley, but sometimes also in wheat sown at early dates.
Let's delay sowing, but safely
In general, the sowing date can be slightly delayed compared to the optimal time frames adopted so far. According to them, in Podlasie, Lublin, Warmia, Mazury, the sowing dates of winter barley start from September 5. In Podkarpacie and Małopolska, the beginning of the optimal dates is September 10, and in other regions September 15. However, the discussion on the validity of these dates is still ongoing, and there are proposals to postpone them by about 5 days. Many practitioners mention that it is not much, and in fact it is worth sowing winter crops 1-2 weeks later than the optimal dates suggest. It seems, however, that a one-week delay is safe because on the one hand it assumes a longer autumn, and on the other hand we have a certain safeguard here in the event of a possible early appearance of winter conditions. In the context of the above considerations, it is worth delaying the sowing date a little, but also without unnecessary exaggeration. Let us also take into account that in autumn the days become shorter and the crops also need light to develop.
