For a generation, farmers have taken for granted their most valuable resource, often considering it to be simply ‘dirt’. The focus has been on force-feeding the crop and beating the soil into submission, driven by an ethos of yield over profit, with little respect for the aftermath. Inputs for many have typically increased since the …
A move towards biological farming is setting one mixed farm up for a better future. Sara Gregson reports Flood water in the lowest lying fields of Brook Farm, Repton in the East Midlands can hang around for months at a time and is a challenge for crops and animals alike. Father Andrew Sread with his …
Turning soil, crop and cow health around on tricky land Read More »
Written by Louise Penn from Ceres Rural As much as I’d like to avoid discussing the weather after this challenging season, it continues to demand our attention. I am writing this after nearly 230mm of rain has fallen in 48 hours in my local area! Houses are flooded and roads impassable where I have never …
Adapting to the Unpredictable: The Importance of Soil Resilience Read More »
As with many aspects of regenerative agriculture, farmers seeking UK-based research to confirm positive features seen in their fields from bale grazing, draw a blank. Sara Gregson reports on an Innovative Farmers Field Lab looking to address this. The list of benefits of outwintering beef cattle on bales of conserved forage that have been placed …
Written by Steve Holloway from Soil Fertility Services Like many other crops, wheat requires various nutrients for optimal growth and development. Nitrogen is one of the most critical nutrients for wheat, as a key component of proteins essential for the plant’s structure and function. When Nitrogen is applied to wheat, it directly influences the plant’s …
The role of nitrogen and innovative biological solutions Read More »
Can how you grow crops impact on the nutrient and health value of food? It’s what farmer and doctor Hannah Fraser is trying to find out on a Nuffield Scholarship By Mike Abram For a long time there has been a suspicion that how you grow food will determine its nutrient status and ultimately impact …
Is regen farming producing more nutritious food? Read More »
As margins are ever more squeezed on farm, over the last twelve months we have seen a significant increase in farmers looking for a more sustainable and cost-effective way of applying nitrogen to their land while reducing farm inputs. Fish hydrolysates are now playing a key role in that search for solutions and are proven …
Fish Hydrolysate: A new way to add traditional support to your crops Read More »
Written by Mike Abram When prices of nitrogen rocketed ahead of last season, and supply looked anything but assured for a time, there was an understandable interest and move towards alternative sources of nitrogen fertiliser. One of those was foliar nitrogen with plenty of growers either trialling or increasing its use. Foliar feeding, particularly of …
How to make foliar nutrient applications more consistent Read More »
Steve Holloway puts the case for biology and foliar KSM – potassium solubilising microbes – for a more natural supply of phosphate and a way of reducing the fertiliser bill. For a generation, farmers have taken their most valuable resource for granted, often considering it to be simple dirt. The focus has been on force-feeding …
In the final part of our series on sap analysis, Mike Abram talks to a farming business that’s incorporated sap analysis into a wide range of cropping Extensive sap analysis, first in trials, but increasingly in commercial practice is starting to change the way Cambs Farms Growers, part of G’s Growers, is managing its wide …
Sap analysis proving valuable for large, diverse farming business Read More »
