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 …
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 …
