Corn cultivation becomes more and more popular across Latvia not only in livestock farming for milk production, but also in livestock farming for meat production. This is because cattle like to feed on corn very much, it is a high-energy cereal and most importantly — it gives a high yield as it can be harvested once per season, producing an equivalent amount of yield from one hectare as provided by grassland when mown 2–3 times.
Based on our experience and yield, next season we will continue expanding corn plantations up to 33 ha. Next season we plan to harvest more tons per hectare because of the use of liquid manure for effective land management.
Main conclusions / advice for corn cultivation:
- correct soil selection — well-conditioned loamy and loamy-sandy soil rich in organic matter and a neutral or slightly acid pH is recommended;
- crop rotation — improves yield and as we have an organic farm we chose winter wheat as the preceding crop in order to control weed abundance, but in the case of a well-prepared and well-conditioned soil it is recommended to use papilionaceous plants as the preceding crop;
- soil treatment — corn requires organic fertilisers, and it is better to spread the fertiliser while doing the autumn ploughing work, as we did, and the soil is ploughed in spring and cultivated before sowing;
- corn fertilisation — we will definitely use liquid manure thereby increasing soil fertility as corn extracts a lot of nutrients;
- selection of the corn variety — our main criterion is as short ripening period as possible and most suitable variety for the production of corn silage;
- sowing period and sowing density — what matters is that the soil is warmed up and there are no frost forecasts when planning the sowing work, starting the work only when rain is expected, whereas what concerns the sowing intensity, we recommend to increase it slightly per one hectare within an organic farming system;
- corn care — weed control and in our case — additional fertilisation with liquid manure at the point when corn has reached the height of 30 cm up to 40 cm;
- harvesting corn at the right time — we kept track of the flowering stage and registered it as this way the desirable level of ripeness sets in within 40 up to 47 days.
Following the recommendations above, it is possible to get a really excellent and rich corn harvest in the organic farming system!
Dace Meldere
