A new farm development structure is now in place in NI, with the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) setting up its first local arable monitor farm.

The host is Richard Orr, who farms 160ha of arable land outside Downpatrick in Co Down. Around 70 growers and industry representatives attended the launch of the programme in NI at the Orr farm this week.

Explaining the monitor farm concept, Judith Stafford from AHDB said that there are now 28 monitor farms across the UK, each of whom join the programme for a three-year period. They normally host between four and six meetings for local growers each year. The monitor farms are not demonstration farms, but commercial businesses, producing real data and facing real issues, said Stafford.

A local steering group that includes representatives from CAFRE, AFBI, as well as other farmers, is in place to provide advice to Richard Orr.

The AHDB role is to facilitate farmer meetings, arrange technical input and co-ordinate benchmarking activity. The farmer meetings hosted at the Orr farm will have an agenda driven by farmers, cover locally relevant issues and be independent of any commercial interests.

As part of the overall structure of farm development activity, AHDB also has two strategic farms, based in Britain, and used to trial and demonstrate the latest arable research.

Discuss

Speaking at the event on Tuesday, Richard Orr highlighted the importance of farmers coming together to discuss challenges and possible solutions to problems.

“By working together, perhaps we can come up with things that do work on each of our farms,” he said.

He believes that opportunities to get a premium from the market are limited, so farmers must become more efficient, know their costs of production, and where cost savings can be made.

For his own farm, he presented benchmarking data from 2017 for spring barley, which showed a £70.94/t gross margin, but when other costs such as machinery repairs, contractor charges, conacre and finance are added in, he had lost £34.79/t. Add in non-cash costs such as family labour and machinery depreciation, the loss was £75.93/t.

By comparison, the top 25% of AHDB benchmarking had a positive margin of £36.13/t after all costs. The main difference is that they are able to spread their machinery expenses over a much larger area of crops.

“My results don’t print a pretty picture from last year. In NI, we are working on smaller areas, but is there a way we can do it more efficiently?”

He would also like to focus on soil health and is open to using more min-till cultivation on his farm. The main crops grown are wheat, winter barley, spring barley and potatoes. Grass is used as a break crop, and 12ha of hybrid rye and 4ha of maize has also been grown this year for a local anaerobic digestion facility.

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