Why should Ukrainian farmers sow winter pea?

Winter pea is gaining increasingly in popularity among progressive agrarians. The desire to diversify risks pushes agricultural producers to grow new crops, including winter pea.

Dmytro Shatsman, director of OOO "Eurosem", told about the advantages of this culture for representatives of the website farmerscan.com.

“The main advantage of winter pea over spring pea is that it forms the root system in autumn, which allows using of winter moisture reserves. In spring, when the soil warms up to + 2-3°С, the vegetation resumes. Therefore, when you start sowing spring pea, winter pea has already formed a sufficient vegetative weight; correspondingly, it can get more moisture to form a crop”.

As it is known, one of the problems in growing spring pea is the drought period, which often falls on the flowering of the crop. Due to stress, the plant drops flowers, as the result, the crop productivity is reduced. Dmytro Shatsman noted that winter pea beas blossom earlier, due to which it can get through drought period. Also, there is an opportunity to take in the harvest earlier.

The director of OOO "Eurosem" underscored that it is necessary to follow certain recommendations when growing winter pea:

“The main recommendation is the choice of a quality forecrop. It should definitely not be beans, preferably not a sunflower. The second is the application of phosphate-potassium fertilizers, due to the fact that pea, as bean culture, is more demanding of these fertilizer elements. The third is timely sowing. The optimal pea sowing time matches with the optimal winter wheat sowing time. Depending on the region, the pea is sown from September 15 to October 15. If you sow pea later, it will not have time to form the root system”.

Concerning the protection system,   said that it does not differ much from such system that is used on spring pea:

“Of course, it is necessary to control the weeds. If we talk about the control of broadleaf weeds, then preparations based on imidozalinone will be effective. Against cereals – graminicides with the active substance clethodim, Quizalofop-P-ethyl. The only feature is disease control. As a rule, there is no problem of fusarium by the growing of pea. Fusarium appears on winter pea in the spring, the problem must be controlled with a fungicide.”

According to the specialist, the winter pea is ideal for winter grains as a forecrop. The leguminous crop leaves a positive nitrogen balance in the soil.

The winter pea will be especially interesting for farms in regions with insufficient amount of precipitations, which are looking for an alternative variant to sunflower in their crop rotation. Southern areas with moisture deficiency are best suited for this culture. There winter pea will have advantages over spring ones.

From the viewpoint of profitability, it is necessary to consider one important nuance. Today, pea is an export culture, and its potential directly depends on the needs of such countries as India, Pakistan, and Turkey. For this reason, prices at the market of this culture are not stable and are subjected to sharp jumps. The cultivation of most niche crops poses certain risks for agrarians. Everyone decides at own discretion, whether it is worth to run the risk or not.

Volodymyr Dutchak, a farmer from FE "Mamyne ozero", Bobrynets Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, risked growing this crop.

So, journalists of the website farmerscan.com communicated with the agronomist.

"We have already sown pea for the second year.  The first year we had 10 hectares, this year – 65 hectares. The sunflower grew on the field; we mowed it, cut the stick with a mulcher. Then we carried out disk plowing of 8 cm and together with fertilizers sew with a density of 1.5 million seeds per hectare. We have sown pea in a wet ground, it sprouted very well and has no stains.  We sew a sort NS Moroz on September 13.  We decided to sow it, because it is a good forecrop, the harvest of winter pea is better than of spring pea.  It is not very demanding, we performed weed control and that was all. In the spring, we will apply nutrition”, said Serhii Smyk, an agronomist at the enterprise.