Healthy soils, healthy crops, less inputs, more margin: Malmesbury Monitor Farm

With increasing pressure on farming practices on environmental impact, pressure on margins, and the need for business resilience, this meeting will highlight the soil as the key resource and its potential to be a solution for many of  today’s challenges.

At this meeting, Joel Williams will explore the key interactions in soil, management practices to influence then, and how these can result in healthier soils, then healthier more resilient crops requiring lower inputs and generating better margins.

About the farm

Roger Wilson farms in partnership with his brother Peter at Lower Odd Farm in Wiltshire. They have 170 ha owned land plus 10 ha rented grassland. The arable rotation is flexible, incorporating winter wheat, oilseed rape, spring beans, winter and spring barley as well as grass leys. All crops are dried and stored on-farm. The farm has a beef herd which are fed home-grown cereals. Key challenges for the farm are the threat of ryegrass, inconsistent bean yields, rape establishment, pyrethroid resistance and managing the farm’s heavier soils. During the three years of the Monitor Farm programme, Roger would like to address topics including succession, soil management and the evaluation of variable rate fertilisers.