National Activities - Denmark Can New Plantations of Salix and Miscanthus be Established with Reduced Manual Labour?

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INTRODUCTION

One barrier for growing Salix and especially Miscanthus is the high cost of establishing a new plantation. The traditional way is to use cuttings for Salix and plantlets for Miscanthus. For both crops the production of material ready for planting is very labour consuming.
Even in large scale production of Salix cuttings, much handwork is needed. About half the cost of producing cuttings is labour.
Miscanthus plantlets must be made from either divided mother plants (rhizomes), or from micro-propagated material, both methods are very labour intensive. The cost of raising the plants in greenhouses also adds to the expenses.

METHODS

The Danish Institute of Plant and Soil Science (DIPS) have been testing a method of Mechanical propagation of Miscanthus since 1990. The principle is very simple. Using a rotary cultivator, they divide the mother plants in the field, a stone picker lifts the divided mother plants which are transported to the new field. Here the rhizomes are spread out and finally ploughed into the ground.

For Salix a similar method has been tested in Sweden. An Austoft sugar cane harvester has been used to produce cuttings of one year stems. An Austoft cane planter was used for planting the material (the cuttings are placed in a depth of 8-10 cm).

Another method for planting Salix is to use whole stems planted horizontally. This method has been tested by Hvidsted Energy Forestry in Denmark.

To evaluate these methods an experiment is being carried out at Research Centre Foulum this year. The project is a cooperation between DIPS and DFLRI (Danish Forest and Landscape Research Institute).

In both crops, weed control is very important during establishment. Therefore the use of herbicides and mechanical weed control are also compared in this experiment.

Measurements will include number of shoots, shoot length, uniformity, competition against weeds, winter survival and calculations of the costs of each method.