What we’ve learned about lentil pod loss
About this episode
This episode discusses the challenges of lentil pod loss and strategies for managing it.
In this episode, agronomist Sam Trengove, from Trengove Consulting, and lentil farmer Tim Millard talk about one of the greatest challenges for legume growers - lentil pod loss. Lentil pod loss can be devastating to a crop. In some instances, farmers can lose up to 60 percent and the main cause, wind, is out of their hands to control. GRDC has invested in a multi-year grain legume project in South Australia, in part looking at how to prevent such dramatic lentil seed pod losses between maturity and harvest. While researchers found no silver bullets, they emphasise controlling what you can and using harvest timing, machinery setup, and awareness of conditions to capture as much of the crop as possible, while research continues to search for longer term solutions. In addition to the comments within this episode, agronomist Sam Trengove emphasises the question of what growers can do now in terms of timing of desiccation and timeliness of harvest with respect to wind events. He states that growers with large programs should stagger their desiccation times in line with their harvest capacity, so that they don't have all their lentil crop ready to harvest on the same day when it will…
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