Food for Thought

The National Register of Sprayer Operators (NRoSO) has reacted to criticism that the scheme is too bureaucratic and takes too much time to gain the necessary points to remain a member.

Single annual training events - worth 10 points - are to become the focus of NRoSO member training, but attending an event will not be compulsory, and a range of other methods of obtaining the 30 continuing professional development (CPD) points over three years needed to remain a member will still be available.

Sounds like a sensible way forward.

Government ministers are forever going on about their desire to cut red tape.

The problem they face, however, is that it is every civil servant's instinct to do just the opposite. When it comes to red tape, they just can't get enough of it!

There can be no better example than the impending "grower initiative" - an EU-backed outgoers scheme designed to give sugar beet growers the chance to surrender up to 10% of national quota in return for a compensation cheque worth almost £30/t.

Notices of the scheme have already been posted on the RPA website and application forms will be sent to growers next week.

There's just one problem. The grower initiative is not actually going to happen - and DEFRA knows this!

This is because the EU regulation says that, if the processor agrees to surrender more quota than beet growers, then the grower initiative is null and void.

British Sugar has already told DEFRA it plans to relinquish 13.5% of national quota next year. Indeed it has been in detailed discussion with DEFRA and the NFU on the best way to achieve this.

DEFRA's decision to launch the grower initiative is a bureaucratic nonsense. Not only will it get growers' hopes up, it will also create extra red tape and lead to yet more confusion. It is unnecessary and smacks of "jobs for the boys".

Every now and again you get the opportunity to go to an event that leaves you feeling inspired. Last Friday’s Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust’s grey partridge conference in Cambridge was just such an occasion.

Described several times by speakers as an iconic bird, grey partridge numbers have declined from over a million pairs pre-World War I to less than a 100,000 now.

But 40 years of research by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has identified what management practices farmers can put in place to reverse that decline.

One of our Barometer farmers tells me that he has "the distinct feeling that the chemical industry is inflating prices on the back of the wheat market".

We've also been told that a well known seed dressing was temporarily unavailable at the end of last week.

What's your experience? Are the prices you've been quoted any higher than last year's, and if so by how by how much? Have you found it hard to get hold of anything you need yet?

I’ve seen some big sugar beet but this one has to be the biggest! As you might be able to make out from the mountains in the picture it wasn’t grown in the UK. No, this is beet growing South African style.

Their sugar beet crops in Fish River Valley on the Eastern Cape grow for between nine and 14 months, according to Mike Hendrikse, who sent me the picture. His team started growing beet around ten years ago, first for sugar processing, and now, after discovering that was not going to be economic, to supply an ethanol plant.

This year, they have harvested 150ha of commercial beet, planted to verify a feasibility study that predicted yields of at least 95t/ha. “In the four areas we planted we improved on those predictions comfortably,” Mike reports.

And not only that sugar levels were well in excess of 20%! Apparently their cool winter evenings and warm days suit the growth of beet and promote the accumulation of sugar. You’re telling me….!

For more information see here

Yesterday an agronomist rang me to see whether I could find out the price for oilseed rape 25 years ago in 1982 for a presentation he is giving next week.

Luckily we have most, if not all, old copies of FW hiding in cupboards in the office – a fact I only found out yesterday – so finding the spot price wasn’t too difficult. Want to know what it was? £265/t – probably because no where near as much was grown 25 years ago.

Interestingly, feed wheat on that day was trading at £108/t, milling £114/t. Being an anorak for figures, and after discovering how easy to search our back catalogue is, I did a quick check of prices for every five years since then. It doesn’t half show the volatility of the past 25 years!

See price table below.

Headline wheat prices of more than £150/t appear to be great news for arable growers, but inevitably mean massive cost increases for livestock farmers.

Again, the industry faces an uncomfortable prospect of welcoming the renewal of one sector’s fortunes at the painful expense of another.

Of course, £150/t, with sizeable premiums for milling wheat, is excellent news. But it would be too easy to lose sight of how uncertain the market looked just a year ago, with feed wheat struggling to better £70/t. Many farmers sensibly committed significant tonnages ahead as prices started to rise and some will be kicking themselves as the market took off in the past few weeks.

I've been fighting a losing battle with the slugs in my garden so this piece on the BBC website caught my eye.

It quotes Bayer's Bill Lankford as saying that if it continues to be wet and warm - as long-range forecasts suggest - the current infestation could develop into a plague. This is a real worry for growers.

And the figures he quotes are incredible. An average of 61 slugs have been found per square metre of land in counts done by Bayer researchers.

This is an increase of more than 50% on previous years and the total slug population would be nearly 15 billion if this is replicated across the UK.

By senior arable reporter Andrew Blake:

After everything that has been achieved via the Voluntary Initiative, the latest Brussels proposals to tighten pesticide use are particularly unwelcome.

It’s hard to dismiss the suspicion that they have been drawn up by people with only limited understanding of the vital role that pesticides play in most modern farming systems – or worse, that organic methods are the only acceptable way forward.

The VI, initially begrudged by many but increasingly accepted by all but a minority of conventional farmers and organic advocates, has done much to show that the risks from today’s agchem products used professionally and responsibly are minimal.

No system is risk-free. But the VI, with its three-pronged operator training/register, sprayer testing and crop protection management plan approach, has encouraged a professionalism that has long surpassed its initial underlying aim, namely to stave off a tax on pesticides.

So it is particularly galling to see the proposal that the National Action Plan, intended to make swingeing cuts in pesticide use, be paid for by an industry levy or tax.

Those who wish to introduce such draconian measures must provide undeniable, independently assessed, scientific evidence to support their case.

Failure to do so will merely reinforce the view that they are adopting the politically easy but scientifically naïve option of playing along for “green” votes.

Biofuels for transport are developing fast and there is every reason to expect UK farmers to benefit from the surging interest in the sector, explains the NFU’s new biofuels and climate change policy advisor Jonathan Scurlock in the current issue of Crops.

There are powerful reasons why the UK needs biofuels, the main drivers being climate change and energy security. Indeed, the government's chief scientist, Sir David King, has asserted that climate change is a more serious threat to the nation than terrorism.

Former DEFRA minister David Miliband stated many times that our future energy supply needs to "decarbonise and decentralise" to tackle this problem. The NFU firmly believes agriculture is part of that solution, and is lobbying hard to ensure farmers benefit, Dr Scurlock explains.

But messages must be managed with care to ensure opportunities are not lost. In particular UK farming must show it can meet new EU renewable energy targets with UK-grown crops.

FROM where I stand…. It is all too apparent that biofuel interest is booming, but its future is set to be far from smooth and it is distinctly likely that UK farmers could miss out on much of the action.

In the words of the BBC's former rural affairs correspondent, Tom Heap: "British biofuel is proving to be a monstrous challenge to get off the ground, not only as an industry, but as something that is actually being used on the roads."

Environmentalists and the media are eager to test claims on energy saving and greenhouse gas production. "It's on a knife-edge. Biofuels have to be climate neutral not just as a fuel, but also as the infrastructure involved. There is nothing journalists like better than false claims."

Messages to the public need to be robust. "If you are driving your biofuel car at the expense of someone else's hunger there isn't going to be much of a feelgood factor."

From where I stand sodden fields, damaged crops, flooded buildings and cancelled farm shows have a clear story to tell: Climate change is clearly happening.

And if farmers must suffer the downsides of climate change, they should also be able to extract every possible upside it has to offer too.

Rhetoric about the biofuel opportunity is well rehearsed. Farmers can profit from fuel crops - but like so many things in life it isn't a black-and-white opportunity.

New information is emerging as fast as plans for new biofuel processing plants are announced. In the current issue of Crops you can read how proposed EU rules could set challenging standards for greenhouse gas and carbon savings, environmental footprints and net energy savings. Meeting those targets will be paramount to the success or failure of what could be a crucial underpinning of UK commodity markets in the years ahead.

Having just spent all of yesterday at the Cereals event, I am struck by how upbeat the mood is.

Last year growers were definitely in a better mood, but the doom-mungers were still there predicting it wouldn't last.

This year, however, with forward contracts for wheat in the 80s and 90s for the next three years, there really was a feeling that a corner might have been turned.

That certainly was the case among machinery manufacturers reporting long waiting lists for kit - one self-propelled sprayer company saying 18 months!

For years, shoppers and politicans have taken low food prices for granted. But now weather worries around the world are making it increasingly difficult to ignore how vulnerable our food supplies can be. The latest chapter in this undoubtedly long saga was opened this week by the National Office of Statistics. Its latest report on food prices

From Mike Abram, Deputy Arable Editor

Oliver, the driver of the brand new John Deere 732 trailed sprayer we were using, wasn't happy. He'd just banged stakes into three railway sleepers to hold them solid in the tramlines of the wheat, and now, we told him to drive over them at speed while spraying.

By Andrew Shirley, Farmers Weekly Business Editor

And so it's announced that six more ADAS research units are to be sold off by landlord DEFRA.

Part of the explanation was that, with farming in the doldrums, ADAS's research and development revenues were falling and running the farms was becoming a burden to the organisation.

Forgive me for seeming naive, but isn't it now, when farmers are struggling to make a living, that we need more, not less research?

Henry Fell, chairman of the Commercial Farmers Union, makes an unlikely Cassandra. Remember the mythical Trojan blessed with the gift of prophesy but cursed because no one would believe her? I couldn't help thinking of Cassandra as Henry Fell spoke during the Agricultural Engineers' Association conference in London on Tuesday.

Posted by senior arable reporter Andrew Blake:

It's charlock! That was my immediate reaction on seeing this picture and many similarly yellow fields when driving through the west midlands last week.

But it's not. This winter's extraordinary weather has seen many crops which escaped the odd frosts think it's already spring so they've been flowering like mad.

The big question is how should these crops now be managed?

Unsurprisingly one fertiliser company is warning that they could soon run out of nitrogen if they haven't had any of the bag stuff yet.

With so much more effort now going into raising UK yields of this key crop it's a fresh challenge to all those clever commentators out there.

This picture of a field at Fakenham in Norfolk was taken by Mike Thompson of N W Agronomy Ltd on 3 March 2007.

FW's deputy arable editor Mike Abram has his say on NRoSO points:

It really doesn't say much for the National Register of Sprayer Operators (NRoSO) scheme when even the National Farmers Union President, Peter Kendall, is suspended from it for not getting enough points to remain a member.

While that might be a temporary blip through Mr Kendall's oversight in not claiming all the points he was entitled to when attending events with NRoSO points attached, it prompts an important debate about whether all this points gathering is really necessary.

Does anyone really believe that because Mr Kendall hasn't gathered his 30 points that he is any less capable of spraying in an efficient and responsible manner than he was three years ago?

As one poster in our forum elegantly said surely the major qualification to be a member of NRoSO should be to hold the PA1 and PA2 sprayer qualifications?

You could argue why is there any need to collect points on top of that? After all, you only take one driving test to drive a tractor or car, and it's not like car or, especially, tractor technologies, haven't changed over the years. Are sprayer technologies changing so quickly that sprayer operators need this level of continual training?

It strikes me that yet again farmers are being asked to jump through far more hoops than is really necessary. A national register is definitely worth having, but the current points system is simply not working, and needs a complete overhaul.

If a level of continual training is really necessary, surely attendance at a single, standard update training course once in the period of membership should be enough to demonstrate best practice is being followed?

FW features editor David Cousins shares some good news:

You don't expect the stuff you learnt at school or college to be much use in real life, do you?

Quadratic equations, for instance - when did you last toss one of those into a conversation? Latin grammar, that won't impress on the 2006/2007 tax form.

But I have to admit that the agricultural marketing course that I did a hundred million years (well, 26) ago, at a college in a northern town famous for its bottled brown ale and humped bridge, is finally coming into its own.

For agricultural marketing skills, which in those days were considered a bit like quilt-making or origami - nice, but nothing to do with the real world - are now coming into their own in a big way.

What's really brought this home is talking to six oilseed rape growers who have transformed themselves from commodity producers into cutting edge culinary rapeseed oil producers.

Farmers are generally reckoned to be bad at marketing, but these guys are doing a great job.

This oil is terrific stuff and knocks olive oil into a cocked hat on health and food mile fronts but it's a new concept that has to be sold hard.

The last load of Yorkshire sugar beet was yesterday delivered to British Sugar's York plant.

The final 29.5t load was sent in by Helperby grower Richard Spilman, whose family have been growing the crop since the 1940s.