Farmer Focus – John Cherry
John Cherry embraces low-input farming
Farmer Focus – John Cherry
Ocotber 2025 I mentioned a couple of months ago that we’re dividing the farm into two so that my brother Paul and I can do our own things. It’s been an interesting year with some tricky weather, but pleasingly, we spent very little on any of the crops, so yields of 5 to 6 t/ha …
Farmer Focus – John Cherry
Well, 2024 was a bit rubbish on the farm. We didn’t get all our planned cash crops planted, either autumn 2023 or spring 2024 and some of our summer cover crops (grown instead of profitless break crops) were disappointing, to say the least. The spring linseed was a bit patchy too, but the weather ensured …
Farmer Focus – John Cherry
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 …
Farmer Focus – John Cherry
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 …
Farmer Focus – John Cherry
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 …
Farmer Focus – John Cherry
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 …
Inspiration, Innovation And Insight At Groundswell 2021
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. …
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Featured Farmer – John Cherry
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 …
Groundswell
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 …