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Soil health has been broken down into measurable parts to help farmers optimise crop and grassland productivity. As part of the Soil Biology and Soil Health Partnership, a project in the AHDB & BBRO GREAT Soils programme, guidance and protocols have been issued to help practitioners benchmark their soils
Establishment in Oilseed Rape key - this extension to the Oilseed YEN aims to encourage growers to share what works in successfully establishing OSR crops, with a 'Beauty Contest' to make it fun.
Series by the Farmers Guardian exploring issues around cultivations and establishment
Guidance from AHDB to help adapt arable cultivations on a rotational basis Download the Guide, watch videos and use the tools.
This field lab's objective is to investigate the potential of living mulches, creating a permanent clover understory to suppress weeds, cycle nutrients, protect and enhance soil health, as a means to achieving organic and low-input no-till systems - that can be more sustainable than those systems they seek to replace.
Interest is growing in using legumes like lucerne or clover as a permanent understory to cereal crops to provide nitrogen through the season.
An ADAS report to DEFRA in 1998 highlighting key trends and research priorities for the sunflower industry in the UK Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus var. macrocarpus) are in high demand due to the culinary, confectionary, bird-seed and industrial uses of their seeds (and thus oils), in addition to the popularity of the flowers in horticulture. At the time of this report in 1998, the UK imported ~350,000 tonnes of seed annually. Whilst sunflower can be grown in the UK, there are a number of challenges including limited drilling dates to comply with soil temperature requirements, and careful monitoring of a range pests and diseases that sunflower is susceptible to. Further risks such as a late harvest time and the possibility of sunflower itself becoming a weed in following crops meant many farmers were not considering growing sunflowers on their farms. Based on a survey of UK farmers (including both sunflower growers and non-growers), the key factors reported that would encourage more UK farmers to adopt sunflower crops were… To convince farmers of profitability Guaranteed establishment of the crop Earlier harvests Good disease and weed control More information on growing the crops This project provided a comprehensive review of growing sunflower as an arable crop in the UK. You can find the entire report linked at the bottom of this article (including historical and market information on sunflowers) but some of the key sections are highlighted here. Note all information is accurate for the time of this report (1998).
Lots of people claim to have increased their soil organic matter levels by using minimum tillage
Discussion
If you are running an on-farm trial for harvest 2022 comparing cultivation or drilling practices, or you are considering such a trial for harvest 2023, please get in touch. ADAS are seeking to bring together farmers who are testing cultivation practices to enable sharing of experiences and trial results, and we can offer some staff resource to assess treatment effects on crops and analyse yield maps, to get the most value from these farm trials.