September 2024 How one’s life can change between articles! You never think anything is ever going to happen to you! I can honestly say that it has been the worst year of my life so far! As somebody that has always taken health and safety seriously, you just never know what is around the corner …
September 2024 Alice and my pre harvest holiday was with Wild With Consent whose website promises ‘This is wild camping, but not as you know it’. I have always asked for Alice’s consent before going wild otherwise she would have me arrested. What the website actually meant that we could camp in a remote place …
September 2024 Another year has passed and although I am without doubt a bit older, hopefully I am a little wiser from all the errors that I have made. We have tried to devise a rotation based around predominantly first wheats, interrupted with break crops of grass seed (down for two and a half years …
September 2024 The deluge of the last few days, following the wettest winter since 1836 and the drought of the previous year, make it abundantly clear that we’re now farming in a fundamentally different water cycle. Improving the capacity of our soils to infiltrate and percolate heavy rainfall is going to be critical for a …
Innovation: Fun but potentially painful I was recently nominated for the BBC’s food and Farming Awards under the “Farming for the Future” category. Awards are not really in my comfort zone and I thought hard about whether I wanted to accept the nomination. What convinced me to accept the nomination was the fact that the …
September 2024 Harvest 24 has been surprisingly good. We were blessed with fairly good weather conditions for cutting most crops and yields have been respectable ( Mostly around our 5 yr rolling average yields) Most pleasing crop was the Oilseed Rape; The whole 134 Ha was really even from day one and ripened so evenly …
September 2024 Is 2024 the year to forget? Three weeks ago Chris asked me to write another article for DD and at the time we were still busy combining so I marked the email as unread and started to think about what to write! And to be honest for the past three weeks it has …
September 2024 A year since my last article here and it has been an interesting period. With our 6m Weaving GD drill we acquired last summer we managed to plant all our planned autumn crops in 2023. The ones following catch crops were easiest travelling on the green, the ones after beans on stubble were …
Written by Clive Bailye It seems like such a long time ago now, but back in 2008 when we made the decision to stop cultivating and direct drill everything, there really wasn’t a lot of drills on the market to choose from. This made our choice relatively straightforward, but also brought compromises that often saw …
From Innovation to Evolution: A 16-year Journey in Direct Drilling Read More »
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 …
