Ask An Expert: Ryan McCormack on crop diversity
In our latest Ask An Expert video, arable farmer Tom Matthews asks:
“How can I find the best cropping rotation for my soil type and profit goals? And what are the biggest benefits of increasing crop diversity on my farm?”
Here’s our answer from Ryan McCormack of Dennington Hall Farms, Farmers Weekly’s Farm Manager of the Year:
Ryan covers:
How increasing diversity can spread risk and build resilience into soils
How the rotation at Dennington Hall has decreased cultivations and fertiliser
How the summer catch crop manages the weather risk for the autumn establishment
How have you improved your own crop diversity? What challenges have you faced and what benefits have you achieved? Please add your own views and advice to the comments at the bottom of this page.
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Transcript
Tom Matthews
Hi, I’m Tom, I’m an arable farmer from Somerset.
How can I find the best cropping rotation for my soil type and profit goals?
And what are the biggest benefits of increasing crop diversity on my farm?
Ryan McCormack
I’m Ryan McCormack, Farm Manager for Dennington Hall Farms in East Suffolk.
So for us, we’re running a 12-year rotation here at Dennington Hall. And that is about spreading risk, building resilience into our soils and decreasing our inputs.
So we find that wheat, for example, our most profitable wheat is a first wheat. So the rotation is designed to get into first wheat as quick as possible. But also, alongside that, just having wheat in the rotation is quite risky, so we hedge our bets with having a diverse crop rotation. So we have oats, we’ve got barley, feed barley, oilseed rape, peas, beans and last year we grew some mustard. So it’s about finding different markets and spreading that risk from the marketing point of view.
Also, in the rotation, it allows us to grow cover crops and catch crops. With that, then, we’re grazing them and also building our soil organic matter. So we’re creating a bit more of a resilient soil and hopefully increasing organic matter and building nutrients into the soil through the biology. That, in turn, hopefully will lower some inputs, whether that be cultivations or fertiliser.
And also, with spreading the crop rotation, it means that we have a break from disease and pests, and we can use different techniques and chemistry on the weed burden. So, a lot of advantages, not only from a marketing point of view, but also from an integrated pest management point of view and lowering our inputs.
So we looked at summer catch crops. We were getting tricky autumn weather. We had storm Babet two years ago. We had quite high rainfall last year. So the summer catch crop for us was working very well. It created a blanket, like we could actually drill on the green. So we had something to travel on and the soil wasn’t sticking to the machines.
We were building organic matter and also the root structure was taking some of that moisture out. So, the summer catch crop de-risked the autumn establishment. So that was an element, you know, for us that helped with the weather.
We’re on heavier soils, you know, we’re on Beccles and Hanslope clays. There was a question mark and a worry around cover cropping and catch cropping, but actually we’ve seen lots of benefits on that and we have reduced our cultivations and we’re very minimal cultivation. Sometimes we’re actually direct drilling. So that for us has actually worked out all right.
And I think it’s about going and trying these things, you know. You don’t have to hear it from anybody else, you know, get it on your own farm, try it, put it into practice and you can make it work.
Another point there, I mentioned the likes of sugar beet, you know, yes, we’re very area-specific, you know, it’s East Anglia, we have that option. Other areas will have other options. So, yeah, it’s about creating diversity, building resilience and hedging your bets against the risky market.