Farming is not the only industry to face tsunami-sized variations in product prices and input costs. Think airlines, oil, retail, manufacturing, restaurants, hair dressers, theatres… I recently had a very interesting conversation with a very senior oil man who explained the hugely difficult and expensive process of shutting down a refinery and the equal cost …
Some people are born to be leaders, most just learn on the way. The latter seems to be how it works in farming. Our leaders are bred. Groomed though various roles to be the right mix of farmer and business we need to represent us. I’ve had the pleasure in meeting some of the spokespeople …
The Future of Farming: Profitable and Sustainable Farming with Conservation Agriculture Held virtually in June 2021 in Switzerland and attended by 783 participants from farmer associations, international organisations, scientific institutions, private sector, non-governmental and civil society organizations, from more than 108 countries, from the developed and developing world. The main objective of the 8WCCA was …
The 8TH World Congress On Conservation Agriculture Read More »
Written by Joel Williams In the last article we introduced the various habitats that exist on and within plant tissues where a range of microbes coexist with plants and provide many benefits to growth and development. Despite the majority of microbiota living around plant root systems, there are also a range of microbes that also …
Written by Tony Gent With over 60 years of farming, I have seen and been involved with so many changes, as a lad from working with horses and leaving school at 15 to working on my father’s smallholding with only 50 acres and a mix of cropping. The farm began to mechanise and expand, so …
Speech given by Professor Amir Kassam Friends, This is an historic day for the CA movement. It was twenty years ago that ECAF, the European Conservation Agriculture Federation, organized the First World Congress on Conservation Agriculture in partnership with FAO. Today, thanks to continued support from FAO and ECAF as well as other sponsors and …
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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 …
Written by James Warne from Soil First Farming A word of warning to all of you who buy bulk lime products. There appears to be nobody in the supply chain fighting your corner to ensure the quality of the lime you buy meets the legal requirements as laid down in the Fertiliser Regulations 1991. 100% …
Are You Happy With The Quality Of The Lime You Purchase? Read More »
With an increasing number of growers now reaping the benefits of lower disturbance drilling such as the Mzurisystem, we take a closer look at other implements which can prove invaluable to those on the direct drilling journey. Stubble Rake As we say on our own farm, ‘It starts with the combine’. The first step in …
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 …
