Sometimes progress is less about finding something new and more about making something useful normal. Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS Prince William used a line around this year’s Earthshot Prize that caught my attention: “The solutions are here. The challenge now is scale.” There is something quite simple about that idea. Finding an answer is one thing, but getting it used often enough to make a meaningful difference is something else entirely, and that

Timing matters below ground too Written by: Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS I have been thinking about timing. Not spray timing, drilling dates or whether the forecast is going to change its mind five minutes after somebody has finally decided to get going, but what happens underground when a new root first starts pushing into the soil. That root isn’t arriving into an empty space. There is already plenty going on down there, and none of it has been waiting patien

Sometimes the difficult bit is everything else

Because the field gets a vote too

Looking for resilience without looking for miracles

Looking Beyond the Gateway We Can't Save Farming If We Don't Save Soil Steve Holloway — Technical Manager, SFS

I’ll be honest, I’ve been putting out a weekly piece for over 18 months now, and most of you probably will not read this week’s blog. You might be busy. You might be one of the hundreds who hits delete before clicking through. Or I might already be sitting in your spam folder, quietly wedged between a machinery sale, a market update, and an email promising you cheaper printer ink from a company you are fairly sure you have never dealt with. But whether you read it or not, you

It is very easy to say, “we’ll sort that after harvest”. It is also very easy to forget that after harvest is exactly when everyone is tired, the sprayer is wanted somewhere else, the weather has started making decisions, and the list of jobs has quietly doubled while nobody was looking. That is why Bio-Mulch needs to be talked about now. Not because it needs spraying now. It does not. Bio-Mulch is for once combining is finished, when the crop is off, and the field is left wi

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