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Visit the UK’s leading indoor agricultural event, with eleven packed halls of the very latest in agricultural machinery and equipment. Now at the NEC, Birmingham this is free to attend and free to park.
In north east England, we are used to challenging springs but this one stood out, even by our standards. The only consolation is the whole country shared our ‘northern spring’.
Russell is farm manager for John Sheard Farms and a partner in the family farm of D.J. Tebbit, responsible for a combined total of 995 hectares (2,457 acres) with land crossing into Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Cropping is split between winter wheat grown for seed, milling and feed, winter barley, winter oilseed rape, spring barley, spring beans and spring oats. Russell is an AHDB monitor farmer and a 2014 Nuffield Scholar.
We have our annual farm assurance (Red Tractor) inspection during the first week in December. This coincides with my first New Year’s resolution: to keep all of our spray and fertiliser records up-to-date.
Winter has finally arrived allowing sprayers to be put to bed for a well-earned rest following a very hectic period of work facilitated by the unusually open autumn.
I recently visited the AHDB SPot Farm, at Elveden Estate. It is a really great initiative and of special interest to me to see targeted R&D happening on a sandy soil – types of soil very similar to those where I work.
It is certainly looking like a mixed bag for combinable crops across the North East and very much a year of extremes, showing the differences between crops on good land and those on not so good land.