Farmer Profile and Farm Walk

This month's farmer profile comes from Breckland Organic's in Norfolk with farm Manager Chris Negus outlining his system, that revolves around carrots, and his experiences of running the farm and of Organic farming over the years. Chris will be hosting a Farm Walk on 25th April at 4pm, our first OA community event this season in the East. Please come along to meet other Organic farmers and share experiences and ideas. Register here.

WhatsApp Community

Following a suggestion by one of the Board members to use WhatsApp to help build the community amongst our members and improve communications we have set-up a WhatsApp community that allows for the creation of topic based Groups that members can join or be added to. We have already added our research community trial groups and will soon be inviting the entire Organic Arable membership to join and to participate. As well as the current oat trials, Winter wheat trial and Spring wheat trial groups, we will create new groups such as "White's growers group", "Farm walks", "General Agronomy", and species specific groups, and a "Livestock" group. Please feel free to suggest groups that you would like to see created in order to make you feel more part of the Organic Arable community and to foster farmer to farmer relationships. Watch this space...

Planting Records

We will soon be sending out this year's planting records form to find out what crops you have in the ground and estimated harvest tonnages in order to help plan our grain marketing strategy for new crop. We can't emphasise enough just how important and useful these records are to help both ours and your businesses, as they enable us to add all grain we need to market on to our system, and will help facilitate grain sales, which after all is our raison d'etre. Please, please fill out and return these forms as they are probably the most important piece of information you can provide us for your grain marketing. We will be sending out the online form shortly but have delayed it for the late Spring drilling season.

White's Contract 

This year's White's contract will be available shortly, being held back whilst Spring Oats are yet to be put in the ground. This should also help determine a base price that better reflects market conditions at harvest. We will need the contracts returned by mid-May.