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Most farmland birds really benefit from the provision of additional seed Dec-April.  It gives the birds food through the late winter period when seed is in short supply (known as the hungry gap) and as they enter the breeding season.  Cereals and small seeds provide the most benefit.  Suitable small seeds include canary seed, linseed, oilseed rape, red millet, sunflower hearts and white millet.    Why not pick[…]

It was a fantastic turnout for the first meeting of our Regenerative Agriculture Group with over 20 farmers braving the snow to look at the bale grazing set up at Poole Hall.  Huge thanks goes to Jane Oglesby and her team who hosted the meeting and treated us to a lovely lunch of her pasture fed Dexter beef.  Jane has[…]

The next couple of months are a good time to catch up with jobs such as soil testing your fields and analysing manures, and with the price of fertiliser this year it is more important than ever to make sure that inputs are well managed.   Decisions about how much nutrient application is needed should be based on accurate soil analysis, which Defra recommends is[…]

The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is the first of Defra’s three new environmental land management schemes.   It is being phased in and we recommend that farmers take up SFI in 2022 as a way of getting familiar with the scheme and its processes ahead of further expansion.  There will be four standards in 2022:  Arable[…]

Leave one hedge on your farm uncut this season to increase the flowers and fruit available to farmland birds and pollinating insects.  Tag 5 new hedgerow trees across the farm to encourage a new generation trees.  Trees could be Oak, Willow, Field Maple, Holly or even an old hawthorn.

This summer has seen the completion of the second phase of the Mill Brook Project in Tattenhall, funded by Defra’s grant programme to deliver Natural Flood Management measures in the region, which aims to slow the flow of watercourses to reduce the frequency and severity of flooding in communities.  The work was led by ELM Associates, in collaboration with the Environment Agency, Mersey[…]

As you are aware Direct Payments in England will be phased out from 2021 – 2027.  Progressive reductions will be made to Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payments from the 2021 scheme year, paid from 1 December 2021, and then to delinked payments when these replace BPS. The plan is to delink payments in 2024. All BPS payments will be reduced[…]

Claims for your countryside stewardship capital works can be submitted as you go along.  Generally, only one claim is processed at once and they can take 6 weeks to pay so you may wish to group a few projects together before submitting a claim.   Key points to consider are:  Good photos – before, during and after.  Each parcel and[…]

There is lots of buzz and discussion around regenerative agriculture/sustainable farming/biodynamic systems.  Whatever you want to call it, it is clear that we all need to try and farm in a more sustainable manner in order to increase biodiversity, improve water quality, protect our soils and store carbon whilst still producing enough food to feed an ever increasing population. […]