Nuffield Scholars Field Reports

16th September 2004
Brent Alexander Reports from the UK

It was refreshing to travel in the UK and find a few more positive farmers than when we were here earlier in the year with the Nuffield group.

Whilst recognizing that commodity prices were much lower than they had been used to under the old production based subsidy program, the farmers I visited this time were a lot more positive than those of the last visit. This was also despite the fact that the UK has been experiencing one of the wettest summers in many years and that many crops were flat on the ground and sprouting.

My wife Simone joined me for this part of the trip and we headed west of London to the Cotswold’s area, before heading down to catch up with fellow Nuffielder David Miller near Winchester.

David is part of an interesting group of farmers who have combined their farms into one large unit. Each individual farmer retains ownership of his own land, but it is operated by one organization, of which David is the manager. This organization is responsible for all the operations on the farm, which is 100% cropping.

The unique feature of this set up is that all income is pooled and then redistributed according to the number of acres owned. This allows the operators to farm the operation much more effectively by blocking large areas of the same crops/varieties together, saving on transport and other logistical costs.

The group also pool their storage and drying equipment and then pay the individual owners a hire fee. The whole system seemed to work very well and avoided many of the problems associated with achieving much needed scale that plague many other systems.

I had planned a trip to the historic research centre at Rothamstead, more for the nostalgia than anything else, but found that a lot of their research was very applicable to my topic.

Keith Goulding and Johnny Johnston showed us over the long term wheat and grass trials that have been running there since the mid 1800’s.

It was fascinating to look over the grass trial in particular as they had completely manipulated the species content and production of each of the plots, simply by varying the nutrient input.

You could very easily see the effect of repeated nitrogen applications in the absence of lime, as these plots had very little growth at all. The importance of lime was seen in all the plots, as all treatments in agriculture have some acidifying affect over time.

The soil archive at Rothamstead was also very interesting. They have soil tests here for every year from when the trials began in the 1800’s. They have been able to go back and trace many different affects of industrialization on our soils over the years. Some of the more notable examples are nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl accident in the 1980’s and the fact that soil sulphur levels have been dropping since the restrictions on air pollution have virtually stopped the acid rains that had been increasing quickly through the years since industrialization.

This slow down in sulphur depositions has been so marked that crops in the UK have become deficient in this element for the first time in history and it has prompted the research team at Rothamstead to develop a new test for in crop sulphur levels.

The test measures the levels of malate as well as sulphur in the plant. The malate level is important as it rises when then the plant is starved of sulphur and falls back to normal levels when enough sulphur is sourced. The beauty of it is, this malate level rises and falls very slowly in the plant which helps to iron the rapid rise and fall that occurs in sulphur levels in the plant, therefore giving a much more reliable test than the standard sulphur test.

We then headed up to York to visit Chris Dawson, the secretary of the International Fertilizer Society. I had a long talk to Chris about fertilization and in particular his views on the role of precision ag.

One of his main arguments was the fact that he could see no way that precise application of nutrients could reduce the amount of fertilizer a farmer used and that the only way to profit from precision ag was through improving yields with better distribution of fertilizer.

His argument made sense, in that if a farmer is applying the correct amount of nutrients with his current “average system” of soil testing then the amount he uses after precision ag should be exactly the same except that there will be more fertilizer used in the areas where they are needed and less used in the areas that they are not.

Chris agreed that he saw the most scope for P.A. being in the manipulation of pH and nitrogen, but had a novel way of dealing with the phosphorous question as well. This involved using various maps of information, but mostly yield maps and overlaying them to form zones. He was then using these zones to intensively soil test the high yielding areas of the paddock and the low yielding areas of the paddock to establish if there were any phosphorous irregularities across the paddock. Phosphorous would then be applied to correct this imbalance and get the paddock back to an even base.

The phosphorous was then applied at a replacement rate, based on the previous years yield map, thus maintaining a balanced phosphorous bank across the paddock. At this stage he hadn’t tested this theory, but in principle it sounds the most logical method of managing phosphorous I have heard to date.

This principle was also being applied by Nuffield scholar Jim Wilson in Scotland - he like Chris was only just beginning, but had come up with a similar theory.

Jim has been one of the leaders in precision ag work and has actually toured Australia talking at the GRDC updates last year.

He has been working on intensively testing paddocks on a grid system, to form pH and phosphorous and potassium maps for many years and has built up a wealth of information.

The main downfall with Jim’s system is that he uses a small ATV and individually cores each sample across the paddock on a ? hectare block. The system is very intense and slow and as a result very costly. He was very interested in the work on the mobile pH units being done in the US and Australia, to try and overcome some of these limitations.

Jim varied in his opinion with Chris on the fact that there are no savings to be made with the use of precision ag. He had many examples where he had saved clients (he also runs a contracting service for surrounding farms) many tonnes of lime by first mapping their paddocks. Most lime recommendations it seems have some fat built into the to cover areas of the paddock that are very low in pH but still only receive the average rate under a conventional system. It is this fat that is built into the system where the avings are being made.

We left Scotland for France after taking in a few of the tourist sites around Edinburgh, including a great night at the Tattoo, which coincided nicely.