Strategic Cereal Farm results 2023

Our Strategic Cereal Farms put cutting-edge research and innovation into practice on commercial farms around the UK. During November 2023, a series of Tuesday webinars highlighted the latest results from across the network. The webinars were delivered by our farm hosts, industry experts and researchers.

With farm data often from multiple sources and in many formats, it is not always easy to make sense of it, which is why our Strategic Cereal Farms want to unpick the data puzzle. This webinar and blog explore on-farm trial activities in the network that aim to get to grips with data. They cover the use of crop measurements to guide nitrogen decisions during the season and making sense of complex geospatial data sets – covering yield, soil and weather. If you want to avoid getting bamboozled by data, find out about (and keep an eye on) these trials.

Integrated pest management (IPM) in arable farming is evolving at a fast pace. You can learn how our Strategic Cereal Farms use an evidence-based approach to put IPM to work in this webinar. It examines a comprehensive review of a six-year trial designed to reduce fungicide inputs, explores how effective farmer-agronomist partnerships are the foundation to IPM success and provides insight into the on-farm IPM trials in the ground for harvest 2024.

There is a vast amount of information on cover crops, companion crops and living mulches available. However, making sense of it in practice can be a challenge. This is why our Strategic Cereal Farms are learning how to make such options work for their businesses. In this webinar, find out how keeping the soil covered with a range of living crops and reducing cultivation intensity significantly reduced field nitrate losses. How cover crops influence numerous measures of soil health and biodiversity are also discussed.

Nutrient use efficiency (NUE) is a large and complex subject, even when focused on one major nutrient – nitrogen. This webinar kicks off on a positive note from Joel Williams, a world-leading plant and soil health expert, who said that providing nitrogen in more readily metabolisable forms to plants can be done in many ways, giving everyone something to work with to meet the specific needs of their crops. The webinar also features an update on tailored-input experiments, which investigate how to fine-tune nitrogen and crop protection, in addition to the use of foliar nitrogen. On-farm establishment experiments to test the potential of biological inputs to get cereals off to stronger start are also examined. Finally, an experiment to evaluate the impact of a recent drainage infrastructure investment on soils and crops is discussed.