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Crop looks fine, but from the photo that soil looks like a pudding. Soil run together, no structure. If you walked across it would you sink an inch or so and end up with half a kg of mud on each boot? There is little option after beet to do much else - not dissing what you have done there, I...

Janet, just to be clear, I am not doubting your drive and commitment to get in front of farmers - never have we had such good communications with Defra directly - full marks to you and your team for maximum visibility. Farmers are not great at making the effort to read things early and plan...

Correct. Best thing to do is get a mid tier scheme where you can get £114/ha for your cover crops. It'll pay better, and you can set how many you want yourself - ie the lowest ha in any one year of the duration of the agreement

But the NFU does represent about half of the farmers in the England. My concern is that there aren't 46,000 farmers reading this thread.

Wow - that was even quicker than I predicted Clive!

Without wanting to drag up any arguments about how any of you feel about the NFU, I would just implore anyone here to feed back your views on the SFI to the NFU - be it branch chairman, county advisor, group secretary or however else you would like to do it. Like or loathe the NFU, they are our...

between $8 and €85 per ton by the look of it. depends whose buying!

I do contract work for several small farmers - incidentally direct drill - but more to the point is they won't be able to do intermediate level soil standard, never mind what comes after. Some only have 25ha in 3 fields. Unless we split fields up, in order to meet 20% cover crops (therefore...

As ever, its not as black and white as how much carbon is sequestered. A multi species cover will have wider reaching benefits to the soil microbiome. But of course, a poor cover plus a poor spring crop may not return so much biomass as a good winter crop. I have seen, however, every year that...

Hi Janet Could I ask how the criteria of correct level of cover by 1st December will be judged? It says this can be achieved by autumn sown crops or weedy stubbles. If I were to direct drill a 2nd cereal in late October and November, how would this differ from a "weedy stubble" in terms of...

That may well be true, but actually that spatial data is pretty helpful tbh. Even if it does swallow up the entire payment!

Maybe try Roundup Flex or something, chuck 200g/ha citric acid in and half a litre Nurture N or something with fulvic in. It hots it up quite nicely.

She said root exudates build soil carbon faster than above ground biomass by a factor of between 5 and 30times. So if you keep the straw AND plant a cover crop you are going to be best off! We all know its more complicated a decision that just looking at value of straw in the swath, vs value of...

May well have to do that, because I think Mg is a hidden problem here due to high Ca soils, and as you say, the Mg and Zn in Manzi is tiny

Ive learned a lot (or heard a lot) from podcasts and webinars regarding the efficiencies of foliar treatments. What I take from these (and this applies to a lot of ag chems too) is that I need to take more care in formulation and application. This means thinking about the water hardness, rain...

Ive switched from manganese nitrite to Manzi. Its a little more £ (£1.70/l i think) than straight Mn, but has a little Mg and Zn in too, and these were always short on tissue tests, every year (along with boron) Mn is interesting though. Because we routinly use it, and it always shows as...

SRC will work on it. But Saga, Ecorobotix and plenty of others spring to mind.

It'll come. Hopefully quickly now.

Yes, eventually, but because there are other solutions already at market for veg (Robocrop etc) it was the vision of the founders to create a solution for broad acre crops first, as thats the biggest market, and the biggest environmental gain

SRC are developing 3 robots, Tom Dick and Harry to carry out per plant farming. Tom is the scouting robot. He locates and records the position of every plant in the field. That is run through cental intelligence "Wilma", and the AI can now recognise wheat from weeds, final nut to crack was...