From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
Ozzie farmer has the reply to Norfolk’s “extreme weather”!!
An Australian farmer who has discovered inexperienced methods to develop crops in excessive warmth and droughts has given recommendation to his Norfolk counterparts.
Grant Sims spoke at a digital on-line assembly hosted by the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association and its Yield (Young, Innovative, Enterprising, Learning and Developing) rural enterprise community.
With excessive climate changing into extra widespread in East Anglia, he defined how he has optimised the well being and resilience of his soils to deal with the rigours of an Australian summer time.
He farms 8,500 acres in Victoria, together with a 300-strong herd of Angus cattle.
He additionally runs Down Under Covers, a enterprise which sells seasonal multi-species cowl crop mixes to farmers throughout Australia.
And maintaining soil lined with crops between industrial crops is without doubt one of the key “guiding principles” on his farm, which may obtain lower than 200mm of rain in the course of the rising season, and infrequently sees 40-degree warmth and heavy storms in summer time.
He mentioned “cover is king”, serving to insulate the soil and enhance its biology, whereas quite a lot of root depths breaks up compaction and enhance the water-holding capability.
“One thing we are really focused on in our soil health is to improve that infiltration and water-holding capacity,” he mentioned.
“Most of the time we take a look at the realm we're farming two-dimensionally, however actually we're farming a three-dimensional aircraft.
“So if we can increase the rooting depth and the water-holding capacity, we can make use of this out-of-season rainfall, store it, or grow something over the summer which has traditionally not been done – and that is where we implement our cover crops to get the diversity in.”
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/business/australian-farmer-grant-sims-speaks-to-norfolk-farmers-8628500
Somehow, I don’t fairly see Norfolk turning into Victoria anytime quickly!
But what about all of this excessive climate and drought, I hear you say!
As far as April to September rainfall is worried, there is no such thing as a pattern in any respect in East Anglia. Dry summers have been simply as widespread previously:
https://www.ecad.eu/utils/showindices.php?ajgkeo7oovr2mbo7te9b62mrik
Neither are there any tendencies in October to March rainfall, nor proof of unusually dry or moist years:
And with summer time daytime temperatures averaging lower than 23C, I might recommend Norfolk’s farmers have extra issues to fret about than the climate!
