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Harry Horrell of Pode Hall Farm, Thorney in Cambridgeshire farms 485 ha’s in a rotation of oilseed rape, spring beans, maize for AD and spring linseed. Having moved back to the family-run farming business over twelve years ago, there has been a move away from ploughing to all direct drilling today.
“We had a Horsch C06 drill but couldn’t convert our old Horsch box into variable rate so we talked to the Omnia team and between us designed a separate variable rate unit, the Omnia E-Seed kit.”
“Fixing the kit to the drill was as simple as unbolting the land wheel, bolting on the box and wirelessly connecting to the iPad, which didn’t take more than a morning to do,” he points out.
“Variable rate plans that were generated in the office were easily uploaded to the iPad using Connect & Go and that was it – we had a very cost-effective way of converting our existing standard drill into one with variable rate capacity. We had saved ourselves the best part of £100,000 for a new drill!”
Using Omnia, Harry worked closely with his agronomist Andrew Buckberry of Farmacy to generate accurate and detailed variable rate maps which incorporated several layers of information for each field encompassing factors such as soil type, weeds, slugs etc.
“We have definitely seen an improvement in crop establishment using the variable rate approach, the stand across fields is more even as we have been able to battle black-grass spots and areas of high slug pressure by increasing the seed rate in these areas.”
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