ARC's first ADOPT Project: Yorkshire Crop Nutrition Club

ARC started our first Defra ADOPT project in November – the "Yorkshire Crop Nutrition Club" – testing approaches to help farmers make better on-farm decisions with crop nutrition.

There are an ever increasing number of tools promising to save fertiliser or increase yield through a range of sensing, measurement, data analytics and forecasting technologies.

Fundamentally the requirement for nutrients depends on three factors:

🌽 Crop Demand

💩 Soil supply

🚜 Fertiliser Recovery

We can estimate those by Reviewing past measures and experience to Plan nutrient management decisions. In season we can Check nutrient status with a range of tools to estimate crop #deficiency or #sufficiency and judge the likely #responsiveness to fresh nutrient applications. At the end of the season we can #Review the success of our nutrient management to inform future plans.

The Yorkshire Crop Nutrition Club brings together four farmers - Peter Southwell, David Blacker, Liz Harrison, Adam Hayward with ARC and ADAS' High Mowthorpe Farming Association – to:

🎨 Co-design a shared Explanatory framework for on-farm nutrient decisions, from the NUTRI-CHECK NET Plan-Check-Review approach

📈 Explore how best to integrate historic farm data and Evidence for better plans

🧪 Evaluate soil & crop measures & technologies

🧭 Examine the value of benchmarking between farms – can we learn more by working together and seeing our results in the context of others?

🚜 Experiment with ‘modest’ and ‘complete’ nutrition strips

🎤 Exchange ideas and findings with other farmers and stakeholders from the outset

Our farmers are looking at a range of technologies including soil tests, leaf tissue analysis, sap analysis, Paul-Tech nitrate sensors, Messium hyperspectral satellite sensing, SENSEEN Nutriscope sensor, YaraPlus app & N tester, Petiole Pro canopy app and AgAnalyst Ltd. FINE tool.