Written by Jennifer Brodie from REMIN Scotland Ltd A 5-day FACTS Course at SRUC, Craibstone, Aberdeen confirmed our soil is a mix of 5 ingredients: air, water, decayed organic material, minerals and living organisms. After 15 years working with ancient Scottish basalt, that erupted onto Planet Earth 360 million years ago, before vertebrate life lived …
Evolving Benefits Of Using UK Volcanic Rock Dust Read More »
Written by David Purdy from John Deere, based on work at Agrovista’s Project Lamport A project, now in its 7th year, initially developed and managed by industrial partner AGROVISTA to study the cultural control of blackgrass at their flagship Lamport trials site in Northamptonshire used cover crops in conjunction with spring cropping to develop a …
Written by George Hepburn from QLF Agronomy I have worked with farmers on their inputs for the last 15 years. I worked with Soil Fertility Services for 12 years as a Soil Fertility Advisor, advising many farmers on soil health and nutrition. For the last two years I have worked for QLF Agronomy (based in …
How To Improve Yield And Quality After Applying Your Normal Inputs? Read More »
Written by Jerry Alford from the Soil Association There has recently been a lot of interest in the potential of organic no-till and it has been described by some as the holy grail of organic arable farming. It is also something that is of interest to non-organic farms because of the potential to reduce inputs, …
Why is it that grass margins are usually in much better heart than the cropped land? Is there somethingmagical about grass? Field margins in many ways set the bar for soil health on your farm.But is that as good as it can get? And do we need to go down to grass to achieve it?“I …
Realising The Benefits Of Soil Health On Arable Read More »
Written By Laura Barrera and first published on Agfuse.com While soil health may be harder to quantify than benefits like biomass production or input savings, there are ways of measuring how cover crops are making a difference in your soil. While there are numerous reasons for using cover crops, a primary one is improving soil …
If you want to know how healthy you are, there are a myriad of tests and tools to help you ‘quantify’ yourbody condition – blood pressure, body mass index and cholesterol level, for example. Now there is a move todevelop ways to quantify the health of your soil, too. In 2016, AHDB and BBRO funded …
Soil Health: Let’s Get Physical (Chemical And Biological) Read More »
AHDB Animal Scientist, Siwan Howatson, takes a closer look at the potential to incorporate livestock into the arable rotation through establishing a grass ley, while improving soil organic matter and increasing soil resilience. Soil organic matter (SOM) is an essential element because it provides the soil with the resilience it needs to sustain a crop, …
Written by Eliza Jenkins Community Development at Sectormentor for Soils. Eliza helps to nurture the community atSectormentor for Soils – a system that enables you to monitor and assess soil health on your farm. Earthworm Engineers #1: Ecosystem Services Many fascinating papers on earthworms have recently been open access to online readers of the European …
Farmers and agronomists in Canada began exploring the benefits of reduced tillage and direct drilling nearly 50 yearsago. The reasons were simple – the need to reduce soil erosion, retain soil moisture, save on fuel costs and reducethe time taken to establish their crops. It hasn’t been the answer to everything, and in some years …
