Farmer Focus: Defra delivers another stewardship conundrum
© Tim Scrivener In typical Defra style, literally weeks after it left me in a conundrum over our Countryside Stewardship (CS) extension – and I chose not to extend – it announces that as an existing Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) agreement holder I won’t be eligible to apply for another SFI scheme until September.
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This means I could probably have extended CS and still had time to apply for my third SFI agreement. There is quite literally no joined-up thinking on any of this.
Please can we have some proactive thinking rather than continual reactive thinking and U-turns.
With nearly 100mm of rain in January, the farm is definitely at capacity in terms of water retention.
Although there’s virtually no standing water anywhere, field walking is challenging, to say the least.
On the whole, blackgrass control looks to be excellent and although it’s still early days I’m pleased with the level of control.
The frosts in early January gave us a small window to spray off our winter cover crops. The mix of black oat, phacelia and vetch have certainly put a lot of fibrous roots in the ground and allowed good drainage.
I have to say, I’ve gone from being a sceptic to a fan of cover crops. It is a case of finding what works for your farm.
Congratulations to the organisers of the Lamma show, I thoroughly enjoyed my day and although at times the number of influencer photo opportunities and “meet and greets” was quite overwhelming, I’m sure it’s all good for the industry.
One of the things on my list to look at was crop management software, I’ve been on Gatekeeper literally since it started and Multicrop before that, so before we switch over to Telus crop management I thought I would look at the alternatives.
The one that caught my eye was Omnia from Hutchinsons.
It looks intuitive and straightforward to use, and it would help me get to a completely paperless system, so time will tell which way we will go.
The other thing that caught my eye was drone spraying, which isn’t currently allowed for Mapp products, but hopefully common sense will prevail soon.