Most growers already know the difficult bit with oilseed rape. It is not usually whether the crop has potential. It is whether it can get through the early stages well enough to let that potential still matter. That is the bit this approach is aimed at. Not because biological products suddenly make OSR easy. They do not. The crop still has to deal with the usual mix of seedbed conditions, moisture, pest pressure, residue, weather and timing. No product removes all that, and I

Oilseed rape has become one of those crops where everyone pretends to be relaxed for about three days, then starts checking the field like something suspicious has happened. And usually, something has. The awkward bit with OSR is that the important stage happens early. Before there is much crop to look at, before there is much leaf to lose, and before the plant has much spare energy to recover from a poor start. By the time the crop looks thin, chewed or generally sorry for i

I have a theory. I’m betting that if I were to mention calcium, magnesium, Albrecht and base saturation in the wrong room, we would hear the chairs scrape back. On one side, you have those who see soil balancing as the key to unlocking structure, biology, nutrient availability and crop performance. On the other, you have those who hear “Albrecht”, “base saturation” or “ideal ratio” and immediately reach for the research paper, like someone producing a laminated rulebook a

Cereals 2026 at Diddly Squat Farm was never going to be an ordinary farming event. Put one of the UK’s biggest crop shows on the farm made famous by Jeremy Clarkson, Clarkson’s Farm, the Diddly Squat Farm Shop and The Farmer’s Dog, and the audience was always going to stretch a bit further than the usual Cereals crowd. Part crop event, part agricultural show, part Clarkson pilgrimage, and, by Thursday, part practical assessment of waterproof clothing. The waterproof clothing

Admit it, you’ve probably had a field that looked fine on paper, then spent the season quietly proving you wrong. The pH looked acceptable. P and K indices were not causing a national emergency, and the recommendation felt tidy enough. And yet the crop sat there with the enthusiasm of someone who’s been asked to attend a meeting that could have been an email. That is where soil analysis becomes interesting, and occasionally irritating. In part one, I talked about how so

Right, I’m going to be completely honest with you now. There are still some of you out there in farming land who consider soil testing a tick-box exercise. That’s fine, I’m not going to point you out. You know who you are. But can I, at least today, make the case for why understanding those numbers might change how you look at your next field report? There is something wonderfully optimistic about sending a soil sample away. You collect a few cores, pop them into a bag, the

There is a certain type of tiredness that only livestock farmers properly understand. Not normal tiredness. Not “busy week at work” tiredness. The sort where you wake up at 3am already mentally checking gates, calves, water troughs, and weather forecasts before your feet have even touched the floor. The sort where holidays become vague theoretical concepts discussed by other people. The sort where you can identify three different consistencies of slurry purely by sound and no

Modern agriculture is often held together largely by caffeine, weather anxiety, and a deep mistrust of anyone carrying a bottle labelled “bio,” particularly if that bottle claims to do something involving nitrogen. Over the years, we’ve seen that biological nitrogen tends to produce fairly predictable reactions. Some people become immediately enthusiastic. Others react as though somebody has proposed replacing fertiliser with interpretive dance. But most growers sit somewhere

Bio-N is 10 years old this year, which is mildly inconvenient because I still think of it as one of the newer ideas. Time, apparently, moves faster when you spend a decade explaining biological nitrogen to people who keep trying to convert it into bags of ammonium nitrate. For ten years, we have had some version of the same conversation. What is it? How much nitrogen is in it? How many kilos does it replace? Is it like AN? Is it fertiliser? Is it magic? Can I cut nitrogen and

Soil pH gets talked about a lot, but most of the time it’s treated as the problem, not what it actually is. When a test comes back at pH 5.7, the instinct is simple: it’s too acidic, we need lime. That only makes sense if you believe pH is the issue. Spoiler: It isn’t. pH is just a reading. A snapshot of what’s going on at that moment. It’s telling you something, not causing it. If you treat the number without understanding what’s driving it, you’ll spend money fixing som

We spend a lot of time talking about nitrogen. How much to apply, when to apply it, how to trim it back without losing yield, and lately, how to pay for it without wincing when the invoice lands. What we don’t ask often enough is what the soil is actually doing with it once it’s there. We tend to talk as if nitrogen goes in, the crop picks it up, and that’s the end of it. Nice and simple. Unfortunately, the soil didn’t get that memo. A recent independent Paul-Tech field repor

Part 2: Making potassium work, not just applying it. Picking up from where we left off, if Part 1 was about understanding potassium, this is about making it work. Because most of the time, the issue is not a lack of potassium. It is a lack of access, and that comes down to how the soil, the roots, and the biology are functioning together. The important thing to understand is that the system to supply potassium already exists. Plants are not passive. They actively try to

“You don’t always notice potassium when it’s right, but you see it very quickly when it isn’t… usually about two weeks after you thought everything looked perfect.” Part 1: Potassium, the nutrient everyone measures but few really understand. Potassium doesn’t get talked about in the same way as nitrogen, but it has just as much influence on how a crop actually performs. You can push a crop with nitrogen and get a big canopy, plenty of colour, and everything looking right e

Right now, for some of you, most of the focus is rightly on the lambing shed. You’re checking ewes, keeping an eye on lambs, making sure everything gets off to the right start, and generally trying to stay on top of what is always a busy and demanding period. But while all of that is happening, there is something just as important quietly unfolding out in the field. Because the quality of the grass those ewes are walking onto over the next few weeks will play a huge role in

Recent BBC coverage, featuring John Fuller, highlights a familiar concern. Fertiliser prices are moving again, driven by global instability, and there are warnings this could feed directly into food inflation. That’s not a new story, but it is an important one. Fertiliser sits right at the start of the food chain, so when prices rise, it affects everything. The article makes that point clearly. Without nitrogen, crop production would fall, and that has obvious consequences.

Your Soil May Already Be Releasing £140/ha of Nitrogen Each Year You choose… Most soils already contain several thousand kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, yet modern farming still relies heavily on fertiliser nitrogen produced through energy-intensive industrial processes and global supply chains. Nitrogen fertiliser markets have started moving again, driven by energy prices, geopolitics and tightening global supply. That raises an important question for farmers: How depende

Your Soil May Already Be Releasing £140/ha of Nitrogen Each Year You choose… Most soils already contain several thousand kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, yet modern farming still relies heavily on fertiliser nitrogen produced through energy-intensive industrial processes and global supply chains. Nitrogen fertiliser markets have started moving again, driven by energy prices, geopolitics and tightening global supply. That raises an important question for farmers: How depende

Phosphorus has a slightly awkward habit of causing two problems at once. Crops often struggle to access it, while waterways struggle to get rid of it. In the previous article I looked at why phosphorus often sits in the soil, yet crops still struggle to access it. Rather than revisiting the chemistry again, the more useful question is what actually improves that access. In many cases, the answer lies in how efficiently the soil system functions. When biological activi

Let me ask you a few questions. If I told you that nitrogen fertiliser was inefficient, would you still use it? If I told you the price might change tomorrow, would you still buy it? If I told you that next year there would be additional taxes or regulations on nitrogen fertiliser, would you buy more now to avoid them? And if grain prices were unlikely to improve, would you still apply the same rate of nitrogen this season? Because that, more or less, is the situation farmi