From Barley Seed To Brewing Gold

Transcription 

Hi, I’m James Marinos from French and Jupps maltings and today I’m just about six miles down the road from our malting facility here at Great Munden Farm near Ware in Hertfordshire. As you can see, I’m out in the field, and that’s because today something really special is about to happen. We’re about to drill in with our farming partners what’s going to become next year’s winter barley harvest in about 9 to 10 months. 

So I’m here to catch up with Ben Pledger, who’s the manager of great Munden Farms here, and he’s gonna give us a little bit more insight into what that process looks like and how they’re gonna be monitoring the crop over the next 9 to 10 months.

Hi, I’m Ben Pledger. I’m the farm manager here at Great Munden Farm. 

So when we’re when we’re drilling winter barley, this fields about 10 hectares. We work at a rate of about five hectares an hour so we can cover five hectares an hour, so this will take two hours to drill. 

We want to be drilling late September early October to get the optimum yield any later than mid October, the yield starts dropping off, so we get less barley per hectare. 

We also need to factor in several other things, like the wind. Wind this time of year may not be much of a problem for drilling, but we need to spray the weeds off in front of the drill. And we can’t do that when it’s too windy. 

We need to make sure that the seed is drilled at the correct depth, and that is anywhere between 32 and 40 mm in depth any deeper than this, and we lose establishment. Less of it comes up and any shallower lower than that, we can have problems with birds pecking it out, or interaction with the post emergence herbicide, which we put on, which will also reduce yield. 

So before we start drilling, we need to prepare the equipment. We calibrate the drill so we make sure that it’s putting the right amount of seed on per hectare, too high, and the crop will go flat and we won’t be able to harvest it, too low and we obviously won’t get enough yield. There won’t be enough plants in the field. We also make sure that the that the machinery is mechanically fit. So we service everything regularly before we start and make sure there are no breakdowns in field at the critical time. 

Nutrient management to grow any crop is fairly key. If we don’t give the crop enough nutrients, it won’t perform well enough. If we give it too much, we’re wasting money, and we could also run into problems like excess disease and flat crops. So at the moment we have calculated how much nutrition we need. Most of it’s applied in the spring, but, currently we’re putting on a micro granule of nitrogen and phosphate with the drill to aid rooting and early growth. 

So with this crop of winter barley, we’re hoping that we’ll yield somewhere around 8 to 9 tonnes a hectare, and as long as we give it the correct nutrition and it’s got the correct weather behind it, it should make a good quality roasting barley.

We hope you enjoyed the insights in this video today. Thanks for watching. Follow us across all social media platforms to keep up to date with what’s going on, not just here, but also at our Maltings and with our brewing customers from field to glass. Thanks for watching.