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🌾ARABLE TRIAL 25/26🌾
With this year’s arable yields down after prolonged drought, farmers are looking at ways to buffer themselves from the impact of future extremes. Improving soil structure and function has become an even bigger talking point than usual.
We ran a field trial in Herefordshire August 25 - July 26 to look
at how 3 mechanical interventions & a control plot, affected wheat yields and soil infiltration rates on compacted arable land.
The take homes:
👉Aerworx, whether using the horizontal or vertical blade patterned machine, showed a 13- 14% higher yield than the control or low disturbance subsoiler ( + sheep).
These increased yields translated in to not insignificant £ gains per ha .. and this didn’t include savings in time and fuel (when considering the comparable costs of running a subsoiler) nor the future gains of building in long term soil health.
👉The Aerworx vertical bladed machine displayed the best persistent infiltration rates.
👉The farm wanted to compare its usual management practice of low disturbance subsoiling + sheep on that plot for a short period too.
Interestingly the LDS + sheep plot yield was comparable with the control plot
Infiltration rates were similar to the Aerworx horizontal blade pattern but 27% slower than the control and a huge 63% slower than the Aerworx vertical blade machine!
Full details will be published in due course but the reel drives home our headline findings.
💦So if you’re standing on the edge of your cereal fields wondering what you can do to mitigate the impact of these extreme weather conditions, please give us a call. If you consider the above figures, the ROI could come back very quickly.
Many thanks to the farm team in Herefordshire for supporting this trial and to Dale Gwynne for his unwavering dedication, amusing company and bottomless ag knowledge as we collected the endless data sets!