Farming Practices, how wise stewardship of resources

Farming Practices ideas to help you reduce costs, while protecting soil and water.

Read case studies

Best Farming Practices explains how wise stewardship of resources such as soil, nutrients, water and energy can help you cut costs while maintaining or improving productivity.
One of those featured is Philip Chamberlain, an Oxfordshire arable farmer who describes how his crops benefit from regular applications of sewage sludge, pig manure and composted green waste.
From an environmental perspective his use of organic matter and crop rotations is helping to minimise pollution while enhancing wildlife habitats and the landscape.

For example

Greenhouse Gas Calculator Connects Farming Practice with Carbon Credits.

Greenhouse gas markets, where invisible gases are traded, must seem like black boxes to most people.

An input/output window allows them to choose which crops they will grow, yields, tillage practices, and nitrogen fertilizer rates. Given the farming practices chosen, the calculator tells the user how much carbon was stored in the soil or lost to the atmosphere, nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide) lost from the soil in response to fertilizer application, carbon dioxide produced by tractors, and carbon dioxide produced in manufacturing the fertilizer.
No-till management reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 50% due to soil carbon storage.
By simply reducing fertilizer applications, the cropping system reduced greenhouse gas emissions 12%.


Exploding watermelons put spotlight on ChineseFarming Practices

New food scandal as fields of watermelons are destroyed after farmers mistakenly apply growth accelerator

Farmers clear burst watermelons from plastic greenhouses in Danyang, eastern China.

The flying pips, shattered shells and wet shrapnel still haunt farmer Liu Mingsuo after an effort to chemically boost his fruit crop went spectacularly wrong.
Fields of watermelons exploded when he and other agricultural workers in eastern China mistakenly applied forchlorfenuron, a growth accelerator. The broadcaster blamed the bursting of the fruit on the legal chemical forchlorfenuron, which stimulates cell separation but often leaves melons misshapen and turns the seeds white.
About 20 farmers and 45 hectares around Danyang were affected. Environment groups say the overuse of agricultural chemicals is a problem that goes beyond growth stimulants.
Many farmers grow their own food separately from the chemically-raised crops they sell. Recently, however, officials have encouraged coverage of food safety issues.
Zhang Yong, head of a new cabinet-level food safety commission, praised the media's "important watchdog role".
The Fruit Industry Association of Guangdong province told reporters this week that "most 'imported' fruit are grown in China".