Copy

View this email in your browser

Logo

Farm Net Zero Winter update

Welcome to the second newsletter from the Farm Net Zero project, sharing updates for our farmers and other stakeholders that are the community this project supports.

This project, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, is managed by Cornwall College and is a partnership between the Farm Carbon Toolkit, Duchy College’s Rural Business School, Westcountry Rivers Trust, Innovative Farmers and Innovation for Agriculture.

Summary update: Since our last newsletter, the demonstration farms have been launched with their first events and we have been sampling our monitor farms to collect the first year’s data.There are also a series of events being planned for the coming months…

Demo farms update

We hosted three amazing launch events with our demo farmers in September and October. These events have been a great opportunity to meet the farmers, understand their current systems and motivations for getting involved with the project. We also started to discuss some of the mitigation options that are going to be trialled over the next 5 years.

There has been fantastic attendance by our community at these events, and the aim it to continue regular discussions by hosting update events to assess progress on the trials and practical issues that might be arising. The trials are all explained in introductory factsheets, available on the demo farm pages of the website.

The trials include:

  • Assessing the opportunities for diversifying over-winter cover crops as a winter forage by evaluating seed mixes, establishment methods and their performance across a range of farms (forage quality, animal performance and soil health).

  • Understanding the impact of diverse swards on dairy cow performance, activity and rumination, and linking this to soil health and carbon sequestration.

  • The use of green waste compost as a bedding material – the nutritional content of the manure, waste management and nutrient release, carbon and cost savings.

  • Effective methods to make compost and compost teas and their impact on the bacterial: fungal ratios within soil.

  • How quickly can soil organic matter be increased? Herbal leys, composts, composts teas and paddock grazing.

Monitor Farms

We are almost complete with the field sampling for our monitor farm cohort for year 1. This will provide the baseline data for the project looking at soil carbon across a range of fields, and linking in with soil health metrics and overall farm carbon performance.

We are planning a series of get togethers for our monitor farms in the new year, to hear your views on the project so far and what you would like us to focus on for 2022. Please do come along and get your voice heard. It’s also a great opportunity to meet the other monitor farms and share ideas.

Soil Carbon Testing – A Field Guide

As part of the work undertaken through the Soil Carbon project, the research team have put together a field guide for farmers and advisors that are interested in soil sampling for carbon. The guide provides practical information on selecting fields for sampling, sampling strategies, where in the field to take the sample, the frequency of sampling, laboratory methods, proxy tests and what to do with the results. Hard copies of the book will be available at the monitor farm get togethers - and you can also download the guide via our website:

View our new guide to Monitoring Soil Carbon

Field Labs

Following the Demonstration farm meetings, and conversations with attendees, Innovative Farmers are sorting through all the ideas and comments to decide on the 3 field labs. There will definitely be field labs on herbal or diverse leys, composts and compost teas to support the trials being held on the demonstration farms, and we will join the horticultural forum meeting to find a trial there. The problem is always that the topic is easy to decide on, the actual question we want to answer is as always more tricky!!

Upcoming events

Click the links below to book places at our upcoming events:

Getting in touch

This project has been set up to support the community of farmers that we are working with; as such, please do get in touch with the project team (contact details below) if you have any ideas or suggestions as to how we could do more to support you with understanding and implementing practices that help reduce emissions, improve soil health and deliver Farm Net Zero.

All information about the project, including upcoming events, lessons and resources are available here on the Farm Carbon Toolkit’s website. If there’s anything you’d like to see featured, please let us know.

Visit our project website

Best wishes

Becky Willson

Project partners and key contacts: