Jealott's Hill Farm Diary
31 March 2009 | Mark Britton
A new feature which takes a look at what's happening at the Syngenta farm at Jealott's Hill (home to much of the research behind Syngenta's novel technologies). The farm is a fully commercial mixed dairy and arable unit.
I will start by introducing myself and the farm I manage. My name is Innes McEwen and I am employed by Syngenta to run their farm at Jealotts Hill which is near Bracknell in Berkshire.
The Jealott's Hill site is also home to much of the scientific research behind many of Syngenta's novel technologies, although the farm is not directly used for research anymore. The farm is a fully commercial mixed dairy and arable farm extending over 350 ha with soil types best described as variable, ranging from heavy London clay to light, sandy stuff. The farm owns around 65% of this area with the rest of the land rented in parcels from 4 different landlords. The farm employs me and four staff.
We are milking 230 Holstein Friesian cows, averaging around 9,300 litres per year. They are fed a total mixed ration which includes grass, maize and wholecrop forages combined with concentrate blend, soya, molasses, barley etc.
We have 85 hectares as a mixture of permanent pasture and new PRG/white clover leys as well as 40hectares of forage maize grown each year. The maize forms part of the arable rotation which at the moment includes first and second winter wheats, winter barley and winter oilseed rape.
We are the LEAF Demonstration Farm for Berkshire and enjoy hosting farm visits from a wide range of backgrounds and interest groups right throughout the year. We are in the Entry Level Scheme and are at present reviewing our options within this to tailor them more appropriately to the farm and enhance their delivery.
The above is just an overview of the farm. In the coming months I will expand on each enterprise, as appropriate, and share my experiences in my diary entries.
March 2009
Blue sky, sunshine, birdsong, daffodils appearing – time to get ready for spring fieldwork and wait for some “unseasonal” bad weather to come and spoil our fun.
We’ve had a proper winter here at Jealott’s Hill: some really good frosts and even some snow, which is lovely when it first arrives but it doesn’t take long until I’m ready for it to be gone. The winter months have been spent repairing and modifying kit in the workshop, hosting farm visits, attending meetings to keep the NRoSO points balance in the black and learning about the implications of NVZs for this farm. I’ve been trying to help my daughter recently with GCSE maths homework and this has come in handy when trying to calculate the amount of storage we have over winter. So much so that I propose an exam question could be “If it takes 200 cows 4 months to produce 1 million litres of slurry and 250 tonnes of muck, and the farmer needs to spend an extra £50k on storage in order to increase the size of his herd, at what point will the farmer make money?”
The dairy has, as usual been keeping us busy, we are coming to the end of a 10 week spring calving block which started on New Years day. It has gone reasonably well, although latterly we have encountered some problems cows with too much condition going into calving.
On the crop side of things, all our wheats are up and there. Most of them looked a bit sorry for themselves in January with some yellowing around the headlands, but they have improved over February as soil temperatures have increased and more N has mineralised. We have our fertiliser bought in for this year and have stuck with ammonium nitrate, we have some Lith AN which was £260/tonne – I hope its quality will be ok and that I will not rue my penny-pinching purchasing policy! We also have ammonium sulphate to spread over wheat and rape, however I am not purchasing P & K product this year as I am yet to see how it can be justified at current prices, especially with a stock of FYM and slurry on farm that we must make better use of.
Weed control has been variable and we will definitely be back soon to finish the job as we have a few patches of black-grass that need to be gone. Otherwise, considering the variation of seedbed quality and timeliness of application, autumn weed control was as good as could be expected, I guess.
Oilseed rape is all over the place. We managed to get 160 acres drilled last August and most of that survived the slugs and came up quite well. However, we have provided a Brassica salad for the Berkshire pigeon population over the winter months. Having said that we only have 20 acres to plough up this spring.
All for now.
Innes
