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