FEATURE
FARMER FOCUS
CLIVE BAILYE
Risky business The financial results are in, and they are good, in fact some of the best of my farming career to date. It would be wonderful now go on to describe how that is all down to the huge savings in fixed and variable costs made through our transition to a zero tillage, regenerative farming system, although that certainly contributes to the results it would only really be telling a part of a far simpler story. The truth is the financial performance was really because of just 2 key decisions, buying inputs (particularly nitrogen fertiliser) and selling outputs at the right time. So, did I make money farming or trading? And which is higher risk? Farming or trading? How we look at and deal with risk is something that is a key driver to many of the decisions we make within our farming business and something I think everyone should explore their attitude towards. As farmers we grew the crops, we took the risk with weather, put in the hours and were rewarded with a decent harvest, no record breaker but certainly on par and budget for our soil type. As farmers I’m not sure we always realise it but there is great risk in what we do, my father has said in the past “there will always be a harvest” and this is certainly true in the UK but many who farm under climates more extreme than our own will understand this is not always the case. As a result, farmers in such countries seem much more aware of the risk of planting a seed with nothing more than hope of harvest and adjust their investment accordingly to mitigate this.
Weather related risk, be it drought or flood is something that British farmers have enjoyed lower exposure to, unlike many others. In the UK a drought is usually measured in weeks, maybe months, in places like Australia however it’s a question of years. The British are world renowned for obsessing and talking about our weather but in truth its nothing that extreme, making our exposure to weather risk some of the lowest in the world. Yet most people I speak to seem to agree that our weather patterns do seem to be changing, climate change is becoming very real and whilst politicians and scientists talk about it, farmers are on the front line of that change. I’m not convinced the numbers tell the real story, looking at statistics for average rainfall and temperature in my area it seems little of significance has really changed, so why does it feel like windows to establish, harvest and spray are shorter than ever despite us having better technology and capacity than we did in the past? 54 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
The numbers don’t reflect the patterns, the weather seems to get stuck in cycles of wet or dry. The autumn and winter of 2019 were the wettest I can recall farming through, establishing crops was extremely difficult and impossible for many the wet pattern lasted months and then as to add insult to injury was followed by a very dry spring / early summer during which we went 90 days without rainfall, a perfect storm of events which resulted in a lower yielding poor harvest 2020. We can’t control the weather, but I do believe we can mitigate the risk. Our move from a 6m drill to a 12m version for instance almost doubled our establishment capacity, reducing the length of window required for establishment, a move from 24m to 36m tramlines also had similar effect upon application timeliness and were both achieved whilst reducing costs and only really possible as a result of the lower horsepower requirements that no tillage bought to our farm. Regenerative farming systems typically are far more diverse in their cropping and rotation meaning all the eggs are never in one basket whilst spreading establishment, application and harvest timings. Most importantly of all, however, is that building soil biology then changes soil structure and its ability to manage water. There is no doubt in my mind we suffer less from drought on our lighter soils that we used to, better structure and microbiological activity not only is more efficient and able to supply plants with the nutrition they need it is also important to the supply of water directly to where it’s needed. The image below shows 2 images taken the same day in July 2017 from a drone following several weeks without rain, the first is looking over our wheat, the second after turning the drone 180 degrees looks over neighbouring wheat, I think it is clear which crop is better supplied with water despite similar soil types, the only major difference being over a decade of no tillage vs a more conventional plough based system.
Lack of water isn’t always the problem, too much when you want to establish a crop can be equally disastrous. Again, no till certainly seems to reduce this risk and open larger windows
ISSUE 17 | APRIL 2022
