Well, what a winter it has been, with the wettest February on record I can safely say it is the wettest season I have ever seen. My heart goes out to all the people who have been affected by the floods and those farmers who have had land under water for weeks on end. On …
The Jet stream has kicked our arse, but we are still smiling…. With little winter crop in the ground and spring still feeling like a long way off our attention has turned to the cattle. I’m glad we baled every last bit of straw in the summer as we are going to need it going …
Back to Basics In 2013 I was awarded a Nuffield Scholarship to look at the “Long term benefits of No-Till Farming”. My appeal to the Nuffield selection panel was that I wanted to visit farmers around the world who had been no-till farming for over 20 years and try to bring back some common threads …
A Tale of Two Farms It’s been an “interesting” autumn here! It was always going to happen following the “goldilocks” near perfect summer and autumn of 2018. Mother nature was bound to maintain her average and the rain was going to come sooner or later. For us, that time was harvest. We got all our …
Sally owns the Bradshaws Estate in Codsall Staffordshire and talks about why conservation agriculture is her preferred route going forward. My father Peter Smith was a fruit and vegetable grower, farming 1500 acres on 6 farms in the Midlands and the Southeast. After the war, the revolution in farming when pesticides and manufactured fertilisers were …
We will be showcasing all the latest technology from Precision Planting at Lamma show 7th/8th January on Stand 19.412.This will include the integration of downforce sensing, soil sensing and liquid control on our cereal disc openers as well as newretro fit options for all makes of drill + planter. We will also be revealing news …
Well its been quite an autumn since I wrote my last article, most of it spent looking out of the window to see if it had stopped raining. We received 315mm of rain between the 23rd of September and the end of November. A huge amount of rain but in some ways we have been …
I farm 155Ha owned at Greenknowe and around 100Ha contract farmed in Berwickshire, Scotland just 6 miles from the border at Coldstream. The land is clay and sandy loam, deep soils, very variable but the best of products to run an arable business on, any limiting factor is probably me! I do all the farm …
Mother nature was going to give me a kicking at some point! Since starting our no till journey, a couple of years ago, I haven’t really had too much to complain about. We have had two easy autumns where we were able to get a decent amount of ground drilled without too much of an …
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 …
