New approaches

A few of us are involved in a little project looking at the potential for a results based approach to future agri-environment schemes in Northern Ireland. This would be a bit different to previous schemes here, such as EFS, which have largely been action based. A good example of a results based ap

Anyone use seaweed for fertilizer or for eating? I heard rathlin is the place to go!

How do other people try out/ experiment with different agro? Do you have an area where you try out different ideas everytime? Or is it a different location? Thanks

Winners of the new Innovation Competition at CAFRE show a bright future for agriculture in NI Last Friday, eight young innovators from CAFRE shared a prize fund of £7500 after pitching their ideas to a panel of judges including Invest NI and Techstart. The first prize went to Seedability, a pr

Joel Williams is an independent plant and soil health educator providing lectures, workshops and consultation on soil management, plant nutrition and integrated approaches of sustainable food production. He is starting an online course next week on foliar nitrogen. It does look like a deep dive a

I went to a conference in Cirencester last week on Satoyama - an approach to managing 'Social-Ecological Production Landscapes (SEPL)'. It was mostly academics and policymakers so felt a little out of my depth but I understood that Satoyama is about improving the relationship between people and the

We did a field trip to Minchinhampton and Rodborough Commons, 300 hectares of unimproved calcareous grassland stocking up to 500 cattle during the grazing season The area is now owned by the National Trust but the history is that the Lord of the Manor granted the 'commoners' rights to graze and

We recently hosted the final of the Innovation Competition at CAFRE. We had 8 students pitching their sustainable ideas to a panel of judges. We've been working with them over the last while to bring their ideas to life and they were just awesome! The winner was Sarah Podhorova with her system fo

I had the opportunity last week to visit a couple of farmers who are doing bale grazing on their farms. One on the Scottish borders near Hawick and one near Alnwick in Northumberland. It was really fascinating to see it used as a method to outwinter on a large scale in challenging areas. Stuart M

Hi I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in some sort of book swap. I've just finished John Kempf, Quality Agriculture. I'd like to read Gary Zimmer, Biological Farming. Unfortunately a lot of the books I have bought on kindle or audible, trying to buy the physical copies going forward though

An interesting piece from FFCC (Food, Farming and Countryside Commission) Web page here: https://ffcc.co.uk/what-we-do/finance Extract from their website: A key recommendation in Our Future in the Land was the establishment of an agroecology development bank to direct patient, mission led finance t

Just about recovered from the brain melt after getting the deep dive into Charlie's systemic farm masterplan at Broughgammon. A very inspiring evening. Thank you Charlie for hosting. Some photos below but one of the big takeaways for me was how to build a mixed farm rotation incorporating crops and

From the Satoyama conference last week I've been looking through the resources on their website I came across this 'Toolkit for the Indicators of Resilience' It raises some really interesting questions about what we should be measuring and how. We get very focussed on carbon counting but the