Recent content by Grass And Grain

VITALLY important. Strong words. Wonder if the fact they part own Assured Food Standards has any influence on their stance. For over 3 years they've been told about cereals, and they did very little for first 30 months. Could even say they went out of their way to make it look like they were...

All our farms are so different. Soil type. Height above sea level. Local rainfall. Slope.

Although I've a feeling Clive did very well with his autumn crop establishment. Fair bit of it into green covers iirc.

Saving a drop of diesel or sequestering a bit in the soil isn't a great deal of use if you don't get the yield. Then again, some seem to swear by the DD technique. Others swear at it. I don't know what's best, but ploughs are reasonably reliable, although can end up with low moisture retention...

Always seems to be such contrasting experiences. Some say DD is fab and best system, others say struggle to get it to work. Obvs we can have different local weather conditions, but where is the difference? Is it the soil type? Skill/knowledge/system? How wet the particular field is in...

Have NSA got the clout to start their own assurance scheme? and all farmers drop RT in favour of the NSA one.

If they were only voting to decide if they had a vote of no confidence or not, then I think AHDB could have voted in favour of that. Although AHDB are on ownership board, so they could have been voting for no confidence in themselves, so I can see why the individual might decide to abstain...

Yes, the merchant is welcome to take samples, and could have a glance over store/facilities while they're there, even look at your pesticide records if they like. It's probably what they used to do subconsciously. If they could see a farm had poor cleanliness, pigeons in the grain store...

Jim's job is to make Red Tractor successful. He does a pretty decent job of explaining how good RT is, promoting the scheme etc. Just think that if he/she (although she's the chair, so more her??) don't appease the farmers then they'll have no scheme at all if NFU pull out. They're risking the...

Funnily enough, within the main Gatekeeper scheme called EFISC-GTP, which is a little bit like the UK TASCC merchant/haulier scheme but also has the rules about assuring grain with lab tests, there is a little loophole. In the loophole, there is no need for the grain to be lab tested by the...

Does beg the question what's wrong with making all your records available to the merchant/mill, and welcoming them to visit your grain store/facilities. Could AIC find any reason to disallow that? These mills seem content with their ability to purchase non-assured imports, so why not ours as well.

Seemingly at Co-op she got experience of hiring and firing people. Obviously thinks staff need firing if they're not doing a good job.

Just interested. How deep do you think you need to cultivate in summer before the CC ajd? Just a couple of inches or like 6 inches? Suppose it would work either way? Would it? We went straight into a stubble in spring with discs about 1.5-2"on clay, left it to dry a day, then went through...

Not exactly on the side of farmers is he. How many times do we need to tell him, we're sick of having extra and unnecessary RT standards/costs put on us, while we watch imports infiltrate the same supermarket shelf. The pig headedness and dancing to supermarkets' tune will be his downfall...

We need to dig down and understand the reasons why AIC reject UK Gatekeeper. I suppose they're getting a nice juicy RT standard for free, but my hunch is the merchants (particularly a farmer owned one with orange logo) only want to deal with a single assurance standard and different schemes...