Biog: Conor Colgan farms at Lowick Hall Farm,
near Berwick on Tweed. The farm is 700-acres, and the enterprises are an arable
rotation of wheat, barley, oilseed rape, oats and beans. He also has an 80-cow
suckler beef herd. Six years ago Conor completed an MBA at the Royal
Agricultural University; his thesis was on Lean Management, a technique used
extensively by efficiency-critical sectors like the car industry. As part of
his study, he undertook a complete Lean audit of every process on the farm. He
says that this has made him exceptionally judicious about what system changes
he makes and whether the introduction of a new practice will improve the value
it delivers to his end markets and business bottom-line. “If it doesn’t, I
won’t do it.”
Title: Innovations must be farm-relevant
The innovations that have most benefited my farm all centre
on GPS technologies and soil mapping.
I’ve used SOYL to map my fields with the dual aim of
generating a more consistent yield from my lower indices fields and adopting a
precision approach to applying P to the seedbed and K during the growing
season. The net result has been a recovery of soil indices and an improvement
in crop yields.
This approach works well for the scale of my operation and
because I have a lot of variation in indices. For farms where soils are
similar, I suspect that the returns may not be so good.
I feel that the environment for fostering innovation in the
arable sector was hit badly when we lost our national advisory service. When
ADAS in its old guise went, we lost the prism to assess innovation for our
industry.
R&D is now in the hands of the supply chain and its
results are used to sell products or kit. There are too few independent trials
from the like of AHDB to assess how these new commercial introductions really
perform on farm.
So it is beholden on farmers themselves to prove whether a
new technology or innovation will actually deliver the purported returns in
their own farm situation.
In the future, I think it is really important for
organisations like AHDB, TEAGASC and SRUC to analyse the impact of new
developments on a range of different farms, soil types and scale of operation.
This work would give us the clarity we need to truly compare market
introductions, and not take the manufacturer’s word for the projected
improvements we’ll gain.
I foresee that investment into genetics and access to GM
technologies will become the essential innovation for the coming decades,
particularly if issues like Septoria resistance threaten the viability of wheat
production in the UK.
CropTec 2016:
Want to find out more about R&D and the latest innovation and technology? make sure to visit CropTec 2016.
To encourage knowledge exchange among the British farming community further, this year’s event is FREE for farmers and agronomists to attend. You MUST pre-register online to ensure you receive your free place.
General pre-registered admission: £12, all visitors will charged £15 on the gate on the day of the event.
