Autumn Drilling After the summer’s hot, dry and easy harvest, my drilling season proved to be somewhat frustrating. Soils were baked hard and cracked right through until the middle of October, small bits of 3 to 5 millimetres of rain dried within twenty-four hours meaning that even if I could get seed into the ground, …
Nitrogen Use Efficiency and OrganicMatter Having done 20 years of testing for organic matter in my soils I thought it would be a good idea to put all the results onto a spreadsheet and see what has happened over that time. I have a total of 63 tests, some fields have only been tested three …
I have always found that pioneering a different system of farming is a lonely task, there is lot of contradicting advice out there but ultimately you have to make the decisions yourself. I have read stacks of books on soil biology and regenerative agriculture and follow all the latest ideas from around the world, but …
An Alternative System of Crop Nutrition Back in 1894, Julius Hensel wrote Bread From Stones which proposed the idea that all the minerals plants need are present in rocks. He used the annual flooding of farmland beside the River Nile as an example, where the soil’s fertility was maintained for thousands of years by sediment …
I have been farming using zero-till and biological methods for fifteen years and making my own compost has always been an integral part of the system. There are lots of biological inoculants on the market but if your soil is not in a good enough condition to live and multiply, they will soon die out. …
