Farmer Focus

Berwickshire farmer Neil White calls for clarity and equity in their baseline carbon audit on his farm after six years ofNo-till Harvest 2021 was, in the end, better than expected. The crops came out of the wet cold spring looking respectable, but then continually improved to culminate in some top yields and good quality grain […]

What a different a year makes… Steven Lear fine tunes his arable cropping, and looks toAberdeen Angus to produce some low cost beef After the soul destroying previous two autumns when we managed to drill very little winter grain, this year has been rather refreshing. After cutting all of our spring crops in half decent

Every year you learn something new and the last two years have been tough, and we have learnt a lot! This shows in our machinery purchases over this period. We have bought a mole plough, a drain jetter, a set of rolls with paddles and a Tech Neat Outcast catch crop spreader. These are all

And Breathe….. a much better year After 2019 and 2020, I think we can all agree 2021 has been a much happier time to be farming. Prices are good, yields were ok to good, the autumn has been very kind, autumn establishment cracking, smiles all round in the Sly Family, turkey is on the menu

The phrase “Regenerative agriculture” is a relative newcomer to our collective vocabulary, and although it roughly describes the type of farming I attempt to practice, it is not a phrase that sits easily with me, as it is so vulnerable to being hijacked by special interest groups, and can mean very different things to different

The mental weather continues on from the last time I wrote something for this magazine. Stuff looks pretty good. I thought I would do a candid evaluation of how crops are looking to start with. Winter Wheat – pretty good on the whole, difficult drilling conditions and some poor headlands. We drilled a chunk very early.

I am currently bathing in post-harvest bliss. I haven’t actually been through our results in detail yet but I am aware of the general highs and lows. With twelve months of observation of what has looked good and what could have looked better, I am hatching a plan for harvest 2022. September is my favourite

This season has been a bit of a revelation for me on the farm, as we haven’t applied any fungicides on any crops at all (at the time of writing, at the end of May). We’ve got a couple of fields of Zyatt wheat which will get a spray soon, as there is a bit

R & R… Harvest 2021 was the second in succession where the combine saw no rapeseed through its 12m header. At least this time it was planned, as not an acre was planted following the 100% loss of our 2020 crop. This we redrilled with linseed after finding most of the stems were infected with

Well, what a roller coaster of a spring, coming out of yet another wet winter. Land here coped superbly, yet again giving me a real feeling of contentment seeing drains flowing with clear water, leaving my nutrients and soil where they should be. Drilling was a dream this year with crops going in in ideal