Event
Breckland Organics Farm Walk
Organic Arable are linking up with the Oper8 project to visit Breckland Organics, hosted by Chris Negus. As many of you will be aware the Brecklands are the lowest rainfall areas in the UK with an average of just 600mm. The area is very sandy with soils typically less than 5% clay making them free draining, prone to drought, erosion and leaching of nutrient. Whilst easy working they are not fertile.
The cereals have a role as both a cash crop but must support the weed management of the system to keep the carrots as weed free as possible. The farm has irrigation and has irrigated cereal in some of the recent dry Springs we’ve experienced, a luxury not available to most
Chris grows winter wheat and spring oats on the Whites contract so we’ll look at his crops and see how the wheat is developing through the early Spring and hopefully the spring oats will be drilled and have emerged.
We’ll discuss Chris’ weed management strategy which is more intensive than many because the carrots are such an important crop in the rotation and hand weeding them is very expensive and so the cereals must play their role in keeping weeds out of the system to support the carrots. And we’ll be hearing about alternative weeding strategies the Oper8 project are presenting across their networks across Europe.
