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Nick Wilson of Hundayfield Farm just outside York is the host of the Hutchinsons Helix North Farm, one of the Helix Farms network where TerraMap Carbon has been trialled and tested.
The farm consists of 260ha of mainly arable cropping, with land let out for potatoes and winter sheep grazing on stubble turnips. There is also bed & breakfast cattle which utilise the farm buildings and some of the permanent grass in the rotation.
For Nick and his agronomist Sam Hugill, carbon is just a part of the whole farm system, but both believe that it is useful to obtain a baseline measurement now, so that they have a baseline figure to work from going forward.
“The results of the TerraMap Carbon scanning showed up large differences in the carbon balance between the arable fields and permanent pasture, as you would expect. The average across the arable fields was about 30t/ha of organic carbon and it was almost double that for the permanent pasture,” he explains.
“Now that we have a baseline measurement, we can look not just how we can manage our processes to build carbon on the arable fields up to the levels of that of the pasture, but also to prevent any unnecessary losses of carbon. For example we would be interested to look at the impact of root crops on carbon. We will also use cover cropping to prevent having any bare land over winter and reducing loss this way,” says Sam Hugill.
“The carbon management tool allows us to look at these scenario’s using real and accurate measurements and then quantify the impact on our carbon.”
For Nick Wilson the bottom line is that he is a food producer, and managing carbon has to fit into that.
“We always look at what we do and how we can do better and carbon is a part of that – how much we do about it will ultimately be driven by policy – but whatever decisions we make on farm have to be good for us agronomically and economically in the first instance.
“It’s all about adapting what we do rather than radical change- and being able to measure what we have is the first step.”
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