In Praise of Hauliers

We sometimes get minor gripes about the hauliers we use although the vast majority of loads hauled run very smoothly.

I recently had a problem with a courier moving a sample of wheat from a farm to a watermill for the watermill to test. This was organised as a "next day" service and cost over £2 per kg delivered. It was not collected the next day or the day after but on the 3rd day after it should have been. I still don't know when or if it will be delivered.

Fuming on the phone to the courier I made a few calculations and reported to the courier company that:

"As a business we deliver in excess of 20,000 kg of material each year. Sometimes this needs to fit in with the specific collection requirements of the farmer loading and often needs to meet a specific tipping time at the delivery point. This is done for a charge on average of about £0.01 per kg.

Sometimes our hauliers don't get it right but they are all far better than the courier company I have recently had dealings with at a fraction of the cost - about 1/200th of the cost to be precise.

Thankfully we don't use couriers too often. Remember it's two sugars in his mug of tea next time your haulier turns up!

In short, organic soil hangs onto more of its “good stuff” for a longer period of time, while chemical systems can lose the “good stuff” more quickly

What a brilliant synopsis of how a healthy soil works. This report by the Rodale Institute is the culmination of a 30 year trial comparing organic and conventional farming systems in the US and shows that organic systems outperform conventional ones over a wide range of parameters both environmental and financial. It gives a positive view of the benefits organic farming systems deliver in making farming systems more robust in sub-optimal conditions and should be read and taken seriously by policy makers and agriculturalists as we look at making food production better suited for the 21st centuary.

The US systems studied are directly comparable to those employed in the UK but the principles of healthy soils are surely universal. Improved soil carbon levels act as a reservoir of both moisture and nutrients and a biologically active soil can make these available to growing plants. Whether the soil is lacking moisture or inundated with moisture the higher carbon levels seen in organic soils makes them better able to cope with both scenarios.

Read the full report. It is an excellent arguement for greater focus on organic and agro-ecological farming systems. The Rodale Institute 30 Year Trial Report

Organic Arable member hails a fine harvest

Congratulations to Carl Gray on his yields as declared in last weeks Farmer's Weekly article.

Interesting to see Invicta doing so well. Claire has been a mainstay of organic wheat production for a number of years as it has performed consistently well in trials. Perhaps Invicta is set to topple it but remember this is one year on one farm and quite an extreme year in terms of weather.

Let's hope Invicta can perform well in future years to help improve organic yields more broadly.  Was the care and attention Carl gave to growing a seed crop responsible for the additional yield or is the variety itself that much better?   Perhaps Carl could share with us all how he managed it

Organic wheat thrills near Tewkesbury - 9/7/2011 - Farmers Weekly: