Farmer Focus

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

Last night we hopefully had the last frost of the year as the OSR is just starting to flower. I think we can finally relax with pigeon patrol. This has been relentless and my Father has spent a huge amount of time chasing them over the last few months. It seems to have paid off

How I decided to join a carbon payment scheme Not a week goes by without another discussion about getting paid for carbon. I know that many farmers are taking a “wait and see” approach and I respect that. Above all, I understand that making a decision to enter this new market feels big and it

Harvest has come and gone. Yields were good but could have been better had the growing season not been so variable. We had trimmed our Nitrogen rates to 160 Kg/N/Ha for wheat and OSR, but huge swings of yields within the fields told me that the yield had not been altogether determined by the fertiliser

The good the bad and the ugly! As I sit here on the 30th November furiously tapping away to get this written for tomorrow’s deadline I reflect on what has happened since I last wrote. My last piece mentioned how well the crops looked before harvest! How things have changed in just those few short

I was not sorry to see the end of harvest 2021. A combination of low yielding OSR, a large acreage of Firefly wheat that broke down to Septoria, disappointing Extase yields and spring barley that was flattened by August rains meant that it was not a vintage year for us. Luckily prices have compensated to