Farming Matters March 2024 February sees the annual conference for the National Farmers Union of England and Wales. After 6 turbulent years, Minette Batters has stepped down as president. She was the face of farming, appearing on our TV screens every time an agricultural related story hit the news. She has been replaced by Essex farmer Tom Bradshaw. Good luck Tom, I think you are going to need it, there are stormy times ahead. My new role as an agronomist working for John Deere dealer, Farol, takes me up and down the central spine of England. The 7 branches stretch from Midhurst in West Susse ..read more

I am not a big fan of jargon, particularly when it comes to the various farming systems because I think it allows others to jump on the bandwagon of whatever happens to be in vogue. ‘Regenerative Farming’ is one such example, where other players in the food and drink space have latched on to this to sell their products to a premium market. However, for ease of understanding I will break a rule and use the terminology in this column to try to explain what might differentiate the systems. I am looking at this from a crop production perspective in the UK and large-scale farming, not smaller, hor ..read more

Farming Matters Henley Standard January 2024 Goodbye 2023, hello 2024. For me personally and perhaps farming in general it’s time to make a new start. I mostly covered looking back over the year in my December column except rainfall totals. I have been recording precipitation in South Oxfordshire for the last 20 years. 2023 has broken my record at 935mm. The previous high was in 2014 at 887mm, with a 20-year average of 677mm and the 5 year of 757mm. Ever since I was a youngster, I have only ever wanted to be a farmer. I feel this aching loss as I try to come to terms with my forced change of ..read more

My Farmer Focus piece for Tech Farmer a new sister magazine to Direct Driller. For the last 30 years I have been a farm manager, firstly in Kent and latterly in South Oxfordshire. For 25 of those years, after successfully completing my BASIS and FACTS courses, I have undertaken all my own agronomy. An inquisitive mind and a desire to find out what works best on my farm led me to get involved with on farm trials. Life sometimes throws you a curved ball. In October I took on a new position with a John Deere dealer, Farol Ltd, as their in-house agronomist. My role will develop over time, but ess ..read more

Henley Standard December 2023. 2023, the year that in terms of weather events just keeps on giving. No sooner had the Met Office, in partnership with their Irish and Dutch counterparts announced the names of storms for 2023/24 in early September then in roared Agnes. This was rapidly followed by Babet, Ciaran and then Debi. It’s quite possible that by the time you read this Elin and Fergus will have left a trail of destruction as well. Climate change is forecast to make winters wetter and warmer and summers dry and hot. However, this is not exclusive, we are after all a temperate island clima ..read more

Farming Matters May 2023 I am still waiting for it to come dry. After a record low of 3mm of rain in February, March gave us a high of 136mm. As I sit here bashing away at the keys on my laptop, we have torrential rain and thunder.  April also seems to be a wash out in terms of field work. As I said last month, it will come dry at some point, then we will be manic trying to catch up and before long we will be complaining it is too hot and dry. UK farming is going through a massive transition at the moment and like all change there will be winners and losers. Sadly, it also brings out tho ..read more

It seems once again that farming, or rather food, is hitting the headlines. A few weeks ago Abi Kay, the deputy editor of Farmers Weekly, broke the story about the supermarket chain Booths. It ended up in all the national media and was a great piece of investigative journalism. They were selling South American beef labelled ‘best British’ to their customers. The fraud was committed by Loscoe Chilled Foods, a Derbyshire based processor, who then supplied Booths. The processor is currently being investigated by the Food Standards Agency and the National Food Crime Unit. Retailers and food proce ..read more

The Climate Change Committee and Greener Henley are great initiatives and ones that I fully back. However, it seems to me that lately they have been hijacked by those with an ‘agenda’. The Henley Standard and in particular the excellent letters page, has recently been filled with arguments about why we should or should not all become vegans. The general theme of the pro argument is that animal agriculture is solely responsible for climate change. The contra argument is that people should have a choice as to what they eat and which diet is best for them. These things are never black and white ..read more

Satellite image of bio mass in one of our wheat fields in January 2023. It seems a long time since I wrote my January column, which was before the Christmas break. As a result there is some catching up that I need to do. Firstly, the annual rainfall was indeed below the twenty year average as recorded by my rain gauge on the farm. 611mm against 697mm. This figure hides quite a range from a high of 887mm in 2014 to a low of 488mm in 2003. January has the highest monthly average with April the lowest. The wettest month in my own 20 year statistics was October 2020 at 182mm. That was the year man ..read more

Happy New Year! In farming and in life it is sometimes worth pausing and looking back to see if you have learnt anything from the past. It’s been a pretty exciting time with the weather over the last year, with record breaking temperatures in the summer and a lack of rain. The rainfall total is looking like being below average, but as I am penning this before the year end, I’m not completely sure yet. In January 2022, I wrote here that I had 3 wishes for the year. Let’s just look back at them and see how they turned out. Wish number 1 was having some sort of food security element to any quick ..read more