The Blind Leading the Blind

The greatest thing about the Horsch CO8 seed drill is the amount of air between the tines. It's rather like looking under the bonnet of my old farm mechanic's Morris van: lots of space to work and it all looks so simple. 

If you get a blocked coulter on the Horsch, there is enough room for a well built man to thread himself through the tines to the middle section and do his work without too much discomfort. As far as simplicity is concerned, the Horsch makes an egg whisk look complicated. There is no dallying with closely packed discs, all independently sprung and leaving a gnats breath between them, not a bit of it. The Horsch is essentially a sparsely shod cultivator with some tubes loosely attached to the back of it's tines spaced generously at twenty five centimeters with a boot at the bottom out of which the seed Is liberally sprayed. 

Aside from the thousands of tyres at the back of the drill used for consolidation, if a young leveret managed to avoid the Case Quadtrac's thunderous tracks, he could easily wander through the working machine without parting a hair, whereas any other drill on the market would see him sliced and diced. This life saving ability also allows the drill to cope with any amount of trash that we farmers can throw at it. When a little bit over overnight rain has kept other drills in the farm yard, the Horsch has been working since six o'clock in the morning with another hundred acres under its belt.

So why haven't we all got one?

Two words: seed placement. Another two words: It's crap.

With many of our tractors steering themselves these days we all have a huge amount of time to look out of the rear window of our metal horse to get a proper look at what we are actually doing. In the good old days of steering wheel caressing you normally saw what had happened during your last bout when you turned around at the end of the field, but with RTK steering our tractor, I have spent many long autumn afternoons looking at the leading tines of the Horsch diving in and out of the seedbed with alarming imprecision. Unless you have achieved a seedbed that would satisfy an onion grower, the Horsch's construction will never enable it to place seeds at an even depth, but what is the problem if an acceptable percentage of the seed comes up in the end?

This is the argument that I have always applied. You might have had to put your seed rates up to compensate for the seeds that the drill had put beyond Hades, but what it costs in extra seed is outweighed in the sheer hectares per hour you can achieve in all weather conditions and in any amounts of trash saving time and sowing costs. That was all fine until this year when we tried blind weeding.

Although blind weeding is common practice on organic farms in many countries, we have never tried it here as historically we have relied on post emergence methods of weed control. It wasn't until an introduction to a young Swede, Joel Massön, who came to see me last summer and extolled the virtues of the technique, that I considered attempting the method. Joel rightly likened our weeding programme to dealing with the problem after the horse had bolted, and he had a point.

Essentially blind weeding relies on weeds emerging before the crop, and this year due to dry weather when my bête noire black-grass was flowering, mean’t that the shed seed would not be dormant and so a good kill might be possible at sowing time. Black-grass generally germinates at one to two centimeters depth and should emerge quickly in a warm seedbed, while wheat sown at one and a half inches should emerge a few days later  leaving you a small window to harrow, or blind weed the back-grass at it’s most vulnerable without damaging the crop.

Timing is everything and so an extra tactic has to be employed. Using a cloche placed on the seedbed straight after you have sown your crop you can predict a day or so before the weeds will emerge, making it easier to kill them before they have a chance to put down proper roots or even see the light of day. 

It was exactly a week after we started sowing our wheat when it all started to kick off. I had been keenly inspecting the cloche on a daily basis which was strategically placed as soon as the field had been sown, when on the seventh day I saw the first blades of black-grass emerging through the artificially heated soil. Scrabbling down into the dirt I found that the wheat had just germinated and had a shoot on it about one centimeter long. Perfect. 

The harrow comb weeder was immediately summoned and after a few adjustments to the rake of the tines we were bravely weeding at twelve kilometers an hour. I hung around in the field nervously for a few minutes feeling slightly under confident about my decision, seeing my beautifully rolled fields being pulled up again. The theory was right, but it looked so wrong, never mind the fact that at that speed with a twelve meter machine you can do an awful amount of damage in a morning.

That night was sleepless. I had visions of thousands of wheat shoots lying mangled in the dry soil with the exhausted seed disgustedly withdrawing it's roots in protest and submitting itself to the inevitable slug. I could hear my seed merchant sniggering into his coffee at the end of the phone as I placed a new seed order to repair my foolish mistake. 

The next morning I sheepishly ventured into the fields that we had decimated the previous day and to my huge relief I discovered that my nightmare had not been realised. The wheat was still growing strongly and I could easily find evidence of weed seedlings lying lifeless in the soil or drying out in the September sun. Joy of joys, it had been a huge success!

However, on closer examination I noticed something else. I could also find wheat seeds that the Horsch had sown at one to two centimeters that although had not yet germinated had been upheaved by the harrow comb and were now too close to the soil surface for comfort. The weakness of the Horsch was laid bare for all to see: horribly inaccurate seed placement. 

In my experience the Horsch places around fifty percent of the seed at the required inch and a half, but the remainder is spread shallowly above the moisture needed for germination, or buried to such a depth that not even the most vigorous seed could ever produce a shoot to see the light of day. All fine if accurate seed placement is not the be all and end all, but as far as this weeding technique is concerned, accurate seed placement is essential.

So, where do I go from here? The plan is to do some plant and weed counts on the fields that we have blind weeded and compare those results with the occasional strips we left unweeded in the fields as a comparison. A further test of the blind weeding will be performed later this month when we sow our winter beans which could be more interesting as the beans are sown at a depth which should, weather permitting, allow a much bigger window for the practice. 

Blind weeding makes complete sense to any farming system where black-grass is a problem, and if it is the success that I think that it could be we may be looking at a new drill. 

For the National Farmers Union Website - October 2013

Just say NO to neonicotinoids

The first time I used a neonicotinoid on the farm was when British Sugar offered sugar beet seed with a seed dressing called Gaucho which contained imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid. It was a bit of a revolution as far as I was concerned because the threat of Virus Yellows carried by Myzus Persicae or the Peach Potato aphid hovered over our beet crop in it’s early growth stages and an infection could result in serious damage to the crop’s yield potential. 

The solution before Gaucho was usually a succession of early forays before bees were foraging into my beet fields with the sprayer and an insecticide to deal with the problem, or even a dusk spray if early morning bright sunlight or frost mean’t that the spraying in the morning might risk damage to the young beet leaves, but also avoiding bees at work.

With Gaucho all those unsociable hours could be avoided by having the seed ordered with the neonicotinoid dressing and to top it all, because Gaucho was a seed dressing and not a spray, bees were now protected from any spraying which might have formerly strayed into foraging hours. Result! Or was it?

I do remember having a conversation with my agronomist at the time about how the neonicotinoid worked and he told me that when the aphid fed on the sugar beet plant it also took up some of the chemical which disorientated it and made it stop feeding. By stopping the feeding it then prevented the aphid from transmitting the virus and hey presto, no Virus Yellows. As the plant grew the chemical remained in the plant which continued to offer protection. At the time I was entirely focused on the positive (or should that be negative) effect that this wonder drug had on the aphid, but I didn’t for one minute think about what effect that the chemical was having on other insects visiting my crop. It’s this unbalanced focus that affects many of us farmers when we are endeavoring to get all the jobs done that we have to do in a day and we often fail to see the wider consequences of our actions until someone from outside of our industry points them. When that happens we usually throw our toys out of the pram feigning doom and gloom for the future of farming. 

That is where we are now with the proposed two year ban on neonicotinoids.

For me, when the whole neonicotinoid verses bee debate kicked off what my agronomist had said to me all those years before about the aphid on my sugar beet plant becoming disorientated rang alarm bells especially with the escalation in the chemical’s use since my sugar beet growing days. I’ve since listened to both sides of the debate, to all the convenient scientific arguments depending on who you are batting for and have come to the conclusion that all farmers should come to given our knowledge of how the chemical works. Neonicotinoids must be having an effect on our bees as well as other pollinators. My conclusion is not science based, it’s common sense based.

I applaud supermarkets and garden centres who have said; we don’t know if there is an issue here or not, but until we know that there isn’t a problem with neonicotinoids then we don’t want to be associated with the product. 

I feel that we as farmers have missed a massive public relations trick here. Instead of hiding behind the doom and gloomsters who apparently speak on our behalf in the press and media who have warned of impending yield losses and even more environmental destruction we should be standing up and taking a leaf out of the supermarkets and garden centres book and we too should be saying No to neonicotinoids.

By the nature of our ever changing job we farmers have always had to be incredibly resourceful. In my farming career I have managed to overcome various challenges; farming more land with half the amount of labour and machinery, overcoming the straw burning ban with a different approach to straw incorporation and weed control, addressing the decline in farmland wildlife species with the help of environmental schemes and more recently as an organic farmer bringing in as much diversity into my rotation to mitigate against climate change as well as naturally finding ways of addressing pests and diseases and ultimately rounding my nutrient cycle by providing the major elements for crop growth with the reintroduction of livestock onto the farm. 

Every farmer has a different story to tell and it’s usually more impressive than mine.

My point is that the banning of neonicotinoids does not necessarily mean more cost to farmers, loss of yield or more environmental damage but it will mean that we will have to think about solutions for ourselves rather than waiting for someone to provide them for us. Increasingly the concept of crop husbandry is being wrestled from our grasp by agronomists and agrochemical companies. We are becoming fearful and under confident of our own abilities resulting in us all running around like headless chickens every time a chemical ban is threatened.

We have always been a diverse and inventive industry and we should have the confidence to find solutions for ourselves and if saying No to neonicotinoids means that we gain more customers, achieve more resourceful farming community and save our bees along the way, everyone is a winner. 

For the National Farmer’s Union website

Environmental Evolution

The first environmental scheme we undertook was way back in the dark ages with a pilot scheme called Arable Stewardship. If my memory serves me well it was trialled in two areas of the country, East Anglia being one and somewhere in the West for the other and it was the scheme that spawned what we now know as Entry Level Stewardship (ELS).

Since then we have been in ELS, the organic version OELS, and now as of this February we have entered into our second OELS agreement topped up with Higher Level Stewardship (HLS).  

As the HLS scheme is competitive to ensure that we came up with an application that was attractive, we and various advisors spent considerable time researching not only the farm's historical story, but also what it has to offer as far as existing wildlife is concerned to determine how we can build on and preserve that inherited base. Without going into too much detail the agreement focuses on four main areas: farmland birds, wood pasture restoration, the reintroduction of livestock and educational access.

Key options selected for farmland birds include grass margins, field corner management, cultivated stubbles and a large area of pollen and nectar mix. With the changes in the scheme’s options after 1st January 2013 I was able to use the pollen and nectar option on larger areas than previously allowed. Being an essentially stockless arable farmer the leguminous element of the mix enabled me to use it for a dual purpose, providing food for the lower elements of the food chain as well as under-sowing it in cereal crops to improve fertility in my organic rotation.

I did have some fairly lively debates with my project officer about wether or not a large area of pollen and nectar was conducive to providing worthwhile public goods. My argument went as follows:

On the heavy clay lands of south west Suffolk there is a huge lack of any over-wintered stubbles, those important sources of over-wintered food for farmland birds. This is due to the fact that trying to achieve a spring seedbed without having ploughed before Christmas to get some decent frost action on our "loving” clay soil (once it's stuck on you, it doesn't want to let go) it is pretty impossible to do so without doing a huge amount of potentially soil damaging cultivations. However, through the under-sowing of legumes for our fertility building we have around 110 hectares of over wintered stubble every year.

In fact, one fifth of the farm is under-sown with red clover which provides two major elements as far as the farm’s wildlife is concerned, over-winter feed for birds through the gleaning of cereal and weed seeds left by the combine harvester and from our run-down plants in our weeding tram-lines and then subsequently pollen and nectar from the legumes flowers. Our farm is an oasis in this respect sitting in the middle of some of the most intensively managed land in Suffolk, and we are going to improve what we do even more by no longer sowing just red clover. The plan is now to sow all our fertility building areas with a pollen and nectar mix to maximise their environmental potential which will be predominantly unfunded by the scheme.

As far as addressing the historical and archeological element of our application we are restoring two moated sites which would have been the entrances to the medieval deer park which was Shimpling Park. Recognising those entrances lead me into researching more about where the boundaries of the park were in medieval times and how it has changed since. This meant looking for wood banks, pollarded trees and pouring over as many historical maps as possible searching for boundary suggestions. My search took me to the National Archives at Kew as the farm had at one time been part of the Crown Estate where I found many clues as to where the park was. My most exciting find was a huge estate map of the farm on vellum with subtle colouring of the different land uses and also the then field names many of which still exist today. Interestingly the part of the farm that is Shimpling Park Farm is pretty much the area of the whole park then, meaning that it is likely that it’s entirety has remained in single occupancy for hundreds of years. While I have no immediate intention to try and recreate the whole of the park, we are under HLS going to restore 25 hectares of wood pasture which will also be the catalyst for the reintroduction of livestock onto the farm and the start of my journey to return to a mixed farm enterprise.

The really fun part of our HLS application has been the educational access part of our scheme. Since becoming organic we have had numerous requests to do farm walks which have become a major highlight of what we do. While I take around groups of adults be they farmers, locals or other interested groups, my wife Alice has been hosting increasing amounts of school visits. With no suitable indoor area to teach the children we have had to confine most of those visits to when the weather is likely to be fine. That will all change now with an amount of money we have been given through HLS that will help us convert one of our redundant farm buildings into a classroom with loos and washing facilities. As I write building has stared, and although the farm yard has been turned into a hard hat area, it is incredibly exciting to see redundant farm buildings being brought back to life with the expectation of hoards of young interested minds who we can share our farming story with.

Do you know what, it really is an exciting time to be a.....I was going to say a farmer, but we are so much more than that now, aren't we?

For the National Farmer Union’s website

Buy local and make sure that it is organic

One of the reasons why I converted to organic production was because I felt unable to guarantee that the food leaving my farm was completely safe. To have given the buyer of a tonne of milling wheat that left my stores with all the possibilities of contaminants that I had applied to the crop during my tender I would have had to have given them a declaration that went something like this;

“This product could contain glyphosate, prothioconazole, metaldehyde, isoproturon, trifluralin, diflufenican, cypermethrin, chlormequat, iodosulfuron-methyl-sodium, mesosulfuron-methyl, boscalid, epoxiconazole, urea, ammonium nitrate, chlorothalonil, proquinazid, pyraclostrobin, chlorpyrifos”.

Now I am not remotely suggesting that the cocktail above is dangerous to human health or our environment, perish the thought, but to tell the whole story of how food was produced on my farm I would have had to included all the potential additives that could be present, and I as a son of the soil and not an advanced chemist felt unable to stand by my sale any more and with my hand on my heart and say, “It’s all fine.”

I am one of those who would also like to know if what I am eating contains genetically modified organisms. Not because I that think that by eating it I will keel over and die because I am going to be eaten inside-out by some Frankensein mutant worm tunneling through my stomach, but as someone who is sceptical about the financial benefits and the technology's environmental performance I would like products containing GMOs to be labeled so that I can make a choice of wether to buy or not.

I fear that increasingly I will not be the only more discerning customer in my local high street or supermarket.  

With the current debacle over horse meat in beef products scandal I can’t help feeling that certainly us supermarket frequenters are going to want a little more clarity about what goes on in our food chain. We certainly can’t depend on our toothless Food Standards Agency any more. 

The cost of cheap food has become painfully apparent, and although there will be plenty of punters out there who will buy the most expensive camera they can afford and then buy the cheapest “value” chicken on offer in Tescos, more and more of us are going to want to invest in better quality food, sold to us by someone we can trust and who can help us understand it’s journey from field to fork. That journey should be simple and as short as possible.

The organic story on this farm is very simple. We don’t use any artificial fertilisers to grow our wheat, instead we use green manures, compost and farmyard manure to build long term fertility ensuring that our soil will continue to serve us for generations to come. Neither do we use a cocktail of chemicals to control insects, funguses and weeds as we find that careful choice of rotation, a mixture of autumn and spring crops, disease resistant varieties will ensure a yearly harvest. We plant the seed and tend it in a natural way, farming with nature, not waging war against it. All farmers understand that nature will have it’s way, so why fight it?

The checks and balances in an organic arable combinable crop system go far beyond any assurance scheme that any of my non-organic neighbours have to endure. Balance sheets of all products coming in and out of the farm have to be produced and physically accounted for. Detailed rotation plans for three years in advance are checked for integrity and long term sustainability, the list goes on. In fact, getting a non-compliance through the rigorous inspection is like trying to persuade an organic certifier that the livestock in Lower Meadow are a herd of cattle and not what they look like which is a herd of ponies. You just wouldn’t do it, would you?

So while the supermarkets shuffle, blame and re-stock, you would do better to buy your weekly groceries from your local supplier with farmer connections and if you really want to make sure that it is safe, buy organic.

For the National Farmers Union Website - February 2012