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 …
Staying sane in a crazy world! Every time I sit down to write my contribution to Direct Driller the world seems to be in a more crazy place. Who would have thought a year ago that we would be selling new crop wheat at over £300/ton and paying virtually double for fertiliser and fuel? It’s …
Direct drilling into heavy clays is a battle still to be won Eight years of trials with cover crops and direct drilling has prompted more questions than answers. The soil advisers at Agrii like to remind me that there is more to direct drilling than simply placing the seed into uncultivated ground. “You have to …
Since my last submission to Direct Driller Farmer Focus was September, I owe you a report on what we have stuck in the ground for harvest 2022 and how it’s looking at the time of writing. Buoyed up by my harvest 2021 organic oilseed rape crop, I planted a further crop in August but was …
Following directly on from my January ramblings , I was lucky enough to have a couple of frosty nights in early Feb which allowed me to roll 30 Ha of cover crops with our 10 m roll on the controlled traffic wheelings. I got pretty well 100% kill on everything rolled in the early hours …
As I write I am sure we are all looking forward to Groundswell, getting off the farm is an important thing for many reasons. I still tell people about last years’ experience and how much I learnt. What a time to be a farmer, who could have predicted the chain of events leading up to …
Yet another challenging Spring! Don’t you just love farming! It’s what I love most even though I moan (according to my wife) but if it was easy, everybody would want to do it! Every year is a new challenge, bringing new decisions, sometimes things go wrong sometimes they work spectacularly well. Canola was drilled the …
At the beginning of February I was fortunate enough to attend the 2022 BASE-UK AGM. There were many excellent presentations, including the lecture from Dr Sam Cook on conservation biological control where she referred to the three P’s – Predation, Parasitism and Pathogens. It got me thinking about the next level of IMP that we …
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 …
Risky business The financial results are in, and they are good, in fact some of the best of my farming career to date. It would be wonderful now go on to describe how that is all down to the huge savings in fixed and variable costs made through our transition to a zero tillage, regenerative …
