Reflecting on last season’s challenges and the lessons learned Jeff Claydon, Suffolk arable farmer and inventor of the Claydon Opti-Till® direct seeding system, outlines some of the changes he will be making for the 2025 harvest. August 2024  The title of my last article ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (Issue 28 – July …
High yielding, profitable early-sown winter wheat crops are once again a regular feature on the heavy land rotations at Lamport AgX, Agrovista’s flagship trials site in Northamptonshire, despite a huge background population of blackgrass. Speaking at a recent open day, Niall Atkinson, consultant and Lamport AgX trials co-ordinator, said: “Historically, if wheats weren’t drilled by …
Early sown winter wheat returns to heavy land blackgrass site Read More »
Written by Dr David Cutress: IBERS, Aberystwyth University. Why working with nature and encouraging its recovery is important? Agriculture represents the single biggest use of land area worldwide, as such it inherently has a large role to play in human interactions with natural systems. With an ever-growing population of mouths to feed, following our historic …
Land sparing and land sharing – considerations for farming with nature Read More »
How I think I can achieve scalable no till organic farming Nov 2023 In my opinion the Holy Grail of farming is to find a way both to use no till drilling methods and achieve a conventional farm level of yield with no artificial inputs. One sunny summer evening, this was something I was discussing …
Written 1st June 2023 Trials and learnings of livestock integration at BHF. So, calving happened, with a few more issues than we expected. Through our breeding choices we have managed to significantly reduce the level of human intervention at calving over the last 5 years. However, we hit a small bump in the road this …
April 2023 Since my last article we have taken delivery of the new Horizon disc drill and used it for Autumn and Spring drilling of cereals and Beans. Initial results have been good and I have been pleased at the lack of blackgrass germination behind the drill ( One of the main reasons for the …
April 2023 Winter seems to have finally turned to spring in West Yorkshire, if not a little confused about its timeline! Having had very little in the way of snow all winter, 5 inches arrived on the 10th of March, just over a week after applying 85kg per ha of nitrogen to the wheats and …
April 2023 Following on from my 1st article in Direct Driller last summer, a bit of a summary of what’s been happening since. Harvest 2022 was a bumper harvest for some, but I have also heard mixed results which is the camp we fell into. Our spring beans and maize were our crops that stood …
Written by Emma Adams on behalf of The Farm Carbon Toolkit The second in our series of farm walks was with David Miller in Hampshire. This year’s Arable Soil Farmer of the Year, David is keen to demonstrate how a regenerative system can be both simple and profitable even on challenging soils. Managing 700ha of …
Arable Soil Farmer of the Year – A farm walk with David Miller Read More »
Home-made compost, massively reduced tillage and determined cover cropping have been central to the single-minded drive to improve the arable sustainability of the Green Horizons Network farm at Salford Lodge, Pitchill just outside Evesham over the past decade. A combination of challenging silty clay land contract-farmed with heavy kit for many years and lighter sandy …
Soil-Centred Worcestershire Sustainability Drive Read More »
