Fake news? Harvest 2020 was never going to be great, the perfect storm of a wet autumn and winter followed by a spring drought was always going to end in disappointment. When it came to yields any usual excitement and anticipation was replaced by simple desire to clear ground of such uninspiring crops and start …
Back in issue one of direct driller Mike Donovan of Practical Farm Ideas wrote about our budget no-till drill in his article “How to start drilling for 8k”. The drill had been bought and modified at the time to run along our John Deere 750a, partly to increase capacity to cope with a seemingly ever …
If I was ever to write the script for a farming based horror movie I think the title may simply be “2020’’ ! Last time I wrote it was December 2019 and we were only 60% through our autumn drilling campaign. Well behind our usual planned October finish. The new 12m Horsch Avatar had been …
A Tale of Two Farms It’s been an “interesting” autumn here! It was always going to happen following the “goldilocks” near perfect summer and autumn of 2018. Mother nature was bound to maintain her average and the rain was going to come sooner or later. For us, that time was harvest. We got all our …
Staff changes and opting for a bigger drill Someone once told me that one of the great skills of good management was not being afraid to change your mind. Over the last decade our move to conservation agriculture has created the need to change machinery and labour profiles to match the workload and give us …
The Gross Output hamster wheel It’s not uncommon to hear no-till farmers talk about the ‘hamster wheel’ of tillage – i.e. that cultivation creates the need for more cultivation. This continues until you jump off the wheel and make changes, including those to your rotation and agronomy, breaking the bond that links tillage to growing …
Clive Bailye writes … ‘Last autumn I was asked by a Hungarian company Terragro to run some tramline trials of their Biofil product.’http://www.terragro.hu/products/ The product sounds good, it is the result of 12 years of EU grant funded research and Teragro are the winners of several awards for innovation and research into bacterial strains for …
18 years ago, we bought our first self-propelled sprayer and it revolutionized access to land, it was light and well balanced and made fertilizer and crop protection applications easy. Our timeliness and the ruts we used to leave in tramlines all but disappeared. Back then If you had told me I would ever consider running …
Farming mostly light soils is easy, isn’t it? I’m often told I farm “Boys’ land” and well, I guess in many ways it is. A bigger working window, low slug and blackgrass pressure all seem to make life that bit easier for me than colleagues on proper heavy clay “man’s land”. My gap year from …
