Soil Resilience

Soil is a finite resource, but healthy soils build your farm’s ability to cope with more frequent and extreme weather events, as well as produce healthy, nutritious crops, and improve fertility and yields. 

Soil is also likely to be a key, underpinning pillar of the new Environmental Land Management policy, when further details are released.

The Importance of Healthy Soils

Soil is fundamental for crop production, supporting delivery of 95% of the UK’s food, and storing around 80 years’ worth of GHG emissions in the form of carbon (Environment Agency 2019).

Soil health can be defined as the continued capacity of a soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals and humans. Healthy soils grow healthy crops that are better able to withstand disease and compete against grassweeds.

The 'One Health' Concept

Shows the relationship between ecosystems – soils, plants, animals and human health as being closely intertwined.

Soil Resilience Strategy

Changes to any existing system need to be based on sound evidence and measurements. Our soil resilience strategy (SRS) is the starting point to implementing change. Combining physical, chemical and biological soil assessments with scientific interpretation, the SRS identifies underlying issues, potential opportunities for change, and develops strategies that help growers improve the health and fertility of their soil.

The service allows growers to select from a combination of options, depending on their needs and business objectives. By fostering the growing interest in soil health and sustainable management, the SRS will prevent further degradation and help regenerate soil ecosystems.

Cover crops

Cover crops are recognised as a mechanism to improving and regenerate soil health, and where used correctly, can deliver the multiple benefits, such as:

• Capture and recycle nutrients left over from the previous crop, rather than being leached away.
• Protect the soil from erosion by water and wind, by holding soil in place with root and foliage growth.
• Carbon sequestration: cover crops can have a positive long-term effect on reducing greenhouse gases through the interaction between a diverse living cover and the soil biota, which are capable of storing the carbon element within the soil structure.
• In the longer term, cover crops used as an integral part of the farming strategy will improve farm incomes and sustainability by increasing soil fertility and productivity whilst reducing input costs.

Our cover crop mixes are developed based on a rigorous R&D process, understanding what species are best suited to different systems.

Regenerative Farming

Our purpose as an agronomy provider is to help growers achieve their farming objectives through technically led sustainable advice.

We recognise that adopting regenerative practices such as direct drilling and cover cropping is recognised throughout the supply chain as a multi-faceted way of restoring our agri-environment. However, it is well known that the scientific evidence supporting the effective adoption of these approaches is not well established.

Through our R&D work, we aim to provide the science behind sustainable and regenerative farming, collaborating with external organisations to ensure we capture a variety of data to support our customers.

In 2020, we formed a partnership project to look at how to adopt more sustainable farming system using innovative crop technologies.

We have a number of trial sites looking specifically at adopting sustainable practices, evaluating what that means for soil health, GHG emissions and crop productivity.