I don’t want to bang on about the weather, but the farm here doesn’t look brilliant as a result of all the wet we’ve had these last few months. That and some poor management decisions in the autumn, leaving some undrilled land bare over winter and various late drilled fields succumbing to slugs and rooks …
January 2023 It’s certainly been an odd year. The hot and dry summer made for an easy harvest, but our spring crops were very poor with the slow, or even non-existent start, that most of them had. I’m sure I was whinging about this in the June edition. We didn’t even plant a lot of …
It’s an interesting time to be farming and, as readers of Direct Driller will appreciate, we all have important decisions to make about how we want to take our farms forward. The war currently raging in one of the world’s key breadbaskets is focussing a lot of minds on how agricultural policies should be reframed …
This season has been a bit of a revelation for me on the farm, as we haven’t applied any fungicides on any crops at all (at the time of writing, at the end of May). We’ve got a couple of fields of Zyatt wheat which will get a spray soon, as there is a bit …
We weren’t quite sure how many people we could cram into the Groundswell site this year. We’d redesigned the layout, erected some large tents as lecture halls with double spaced seats to comply with covid restrictions and taken no end of advice from experts who all appeared to be making suggestions up on the spot. …
Inspiration, Innovation And Insight At Groundswell 2021 Read More »
When I was at school, the lights kept going out: we were in the middle of the ‘energy crisis’ of the mid-seventies and the country was struggling to function properly with three day weeks and queues at petrol stations and all the rest. Great fun for us kids, you might as well play outside, if …
We started Groundswell out of a sense of frustration that no-one was putting on a Summer Show to which we mightwant to go. Having gone down the no-till route, we realised that we only really needed a good seed drill and not a barnfull of expensive cultivating equipment, so Cereals and all those Tillage events …
 The third annual Groundswell No-Till Show and Conference took place at Lannock Manor Farm on 27th and 28th June at Lannock Manor Farm attended by over 1,200 farmers, landowners and other delegates with a shared interest in soil health. The theme of the conference was health, the idea being that health is fundamental for soil, …
