Paul Temple

“We’ve always carried out a rotation. I’ve been a strong believer that rotation is your first foundation of effectively good farming. It minimizes the buildup of pests, and problems, and diseases because you’re changing the cropping on an annual cycle.”

“We’re aiming for reasonably high-yielding crops, we’re looking to ensure that the crop has got a good, stiff stem on it and will stand the variety of weather that we seem to receive. We’re also constantly on the lookout for disease.”

BLACK GRASS
“Black grass is probably a U.K. farmer’s number one challenge. We manage it with rotation – and spraying when necessary – but there are the occasional weeds that escape. We go through the field and pull the remaining plants out by hand to ensure we don’t get the return of seed. One plant has hundreds of seeds in it, so if you didn’t do anything to control it, this field would become unproductive because of black-grass.”

SLUGS
“Approximately 22% of the total area of wheat in the UK is affected by slugs. (HGCA Research Review 79). We’ve registered the problem’s there. It’s not going to disappear. We don’t need to treat it at the moment. It’s just a case of watching the weather and keeping an eye on them.”

“Wheat is multi-functional, so you can use it in a variety of places and ways, including fuels, and it fits in with our rotation as well. We use the by-product of the straw to feed our livestock, and then that gets returned to the land in farm-yield manure.”

“I walk the fields and travel on the sprayer. But I think the next generation will get smart in using drones to map these fields, and sense and see things that you can’t with the naked eye.”