Over the past thirty-five years, the Allerton Project has been at the forefront of many developments in how we now manage the farmed landscape. In that time, we’ve collected a huge volume of often quixotic data on everything from farmland bird and insect numbers to the rooting depths of plants under different biostimulant treatments. However, …
Written by Joe Stanley, Head of Sustainable Farming A year ago I wrote in these pages about the relatively neglected state of interest in land drainage in recent decades and the increasingly degraded nature of much of our field drainage network. My hope at the time was to initiate a research project at the Allerton …
Groundbreaking Field Drainage project gets underway at the Allerton Project Read More »
Joe Stanley, Allerton Project and Graham Redman, The Andersons Centre Joe Stanley Since 2017, the Allerton Project has been conducting a nationally significant long-term rotational field trial in partnership with Syngenta across five fields of our heavy-land site. The initial five-year phase of the trial, as outlined in the June 2023 issue of Direct Driller, …
Revisiting the Syngenta Conservation Agriculture Project. Read More »
Written by Joe Stanley from the Allerton Project ‘I know it isn’t the sexiest subject, but…’ is invariably where any mention of agricultural field drainage begins, invariably accompanied by an apologetic shrug of the shoulders and a gaze cast toward the ground. Personally, I take the opposite view. I have always been fascinated by field …
The Allerton Project, as a research and demonstration farm, has been in operation since 1992. We are, however, a part of the wider Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), a membership organisation who have been conducting conservation science to enhance the British countryside for over 90 years. Today, the GWCT’s Farmland Ecology Unit carries out …
Restoring farmland biodiversity: The Allerton Project Read More »
As reflected upon in my last piece, climate change will inevitably drive adaptation in the farmed landscape. This will range from an appreciation that heavily tilled, late drilled arable crops pose an unacceptable risk of being caught out by a wet autumn/winter season in almost any region and circumstance, to farms in certain catchments taking …
Embracing Agroforestry for Climate Resilience and Sustainability Read More »
As I write this in the third week of March, I can reflect on challenging times both behind and ahead. On the heavy Hanslope-Denchworth series clays of the Allerton Project, we are yet to get so far even as to have terminated our cover crops, let alone apply any spring inputs to those autumn-sown crops which have survived the onslaught of one of the wettest winters on record – though we judge that only some 35% of our winter wheat area is even salvageable. Even were the incessant rains to cease today, we are likely looking at planting our wheat, beans, oats and barley well into the middle of April, significantly compromising potential.
Written by Joe Stanley, Head of Sustainable Farming, at The Allerton Project I was recently invited to speak at the North of England Farming Conference at Hexham in Northumbria, with a wide brief to cover anything forward-thinking which ticked the box for both environmental and financial sustainability. Weeks in advance I had submitted my presentation …
Written by Joe Stanley from the Allerton Project It’s well established, including by our own research (in part discussed in June’s article on our pioneering Conservation Agriculture trial), that a move to reduced tillage or direct drilling (DD) can generally be considered beneficial for the triumvirate of farm economics, soil health and environmental sustainability. With …
Written by Joe Stanley from the Allerton Project What it is to be ‘a good farmer’ in the UK is currently undergoing a transformation of grand proportions. Many will have spent much of their careers in the belief that farmed land was for one thing only – food production – and that soil health (to …
Proving the value of Conservation Agriculture in the UK Read More »
