HGCA Nuffield arable scholarship 2014
HGCA Nuffield Arable Scholarship 2014 Award winner Russ McKenzie who farms 750ha in Cambridgeshire is researching direct drilling in extreme weather. Over the next 18 months he will provide regular updates on his findings.
Harvest review
6 October 2014
With travels on hold for the moment, it was harvest that took priority recently. We hold some generally excellent performances all round and everything mostly progressed smoothly, with minimal drier use, although frustratingly we did get rained off seven times out of nine attempts at cutting wheat on the home block before we got completed!…
Understanding soil health in North Dakota and return visits
7 August 2014
If you are visiting Dwayne Beck, then Jay Fuhrer from NRCS is another must visit in this part of the world to get a grasp of how to build soil health.
Farming on the edge with strip tillage
21 July 2014
After seeing large-scale direct drill in North Carolina I flew up to Denver and had a (long) drive to Kansas. My host Gabriele asked me if I knew what the national tree was in Kansas: I thought he was joking when he said it was a telegraph pole. But it proved to be pretty true as there wasn’t much along the route apart from isolated farms and a few gas stations.
Large scale direct drill
My studies in the US started in Beaufort, North Carolina with one of the best visits I have undertaken so far. Open Grounds farm is one of the most incredible examples I’ve come across of visionary thinking that was ahead of its time.
Home and away
4 June 2014
Returning from Australia took me a few days to not only recover from jet lag, but get back to everyday farming in the UK. It’s always nice coming home, especially as I turned 40 while travelling between Melbourne and Adelaide!
Crucially for my project I want to explore every avenue and remain open minded about my approach. So I am visiting people in Europe, recently to the Czech Republic for a meeting with Michael Horsch…
Back to university
24 April 2014
My third week in Australia was spent in the Clare Valley region with Allan Mayfield, a truly inspirational person who was one of the first agronomists to become independent back in the early nineties. Allan has a fantastic knowledge base of all aspects of agronomy and had been instrumental in setting up the Hart trial site, where they have a long term trial on 16 hectares comparing varieties and other agronomic details.
Looking at Real Time Kinematics
1 April 2014
My first week in Victoria, Australia was fascinating and I would like to thank everyone who gave their time to meet with me. My travels took me from Ballarat in southern Victoria, to the Wimmera and Mallee regions and up to the border with New South Wales. Victoria has varying rainfall patterns and I wanted to see how the land is managed at farms within the region.
First blog
14 March 2014
This is my first blog since leaving home in February, and what an eventful few weeks it’s been! My blogs will be more detailed over the coming months, but for now I wanted to show how the Nuffield experience begins.
Direct drill in extreme weather
18 February 2014
After a bitterly cold February morning in East Anglia, the sun came out on Russ’s home near Huntingdon, where he farms his usual rotation of wheat, OSR and spring beans on 750ha of heavy clay.
Russ has been selected as the next HGCA-sponsored Nuffield Scholar, researching direct drilling in extreme weather.
Video