Suddenly, a few days of bright sunshine and things change pretty quickly. As well as the bean planting we are busy with putting the first application of fertiliser on the crops to help them wake up after the long winter. For both jobs we have invested in some new toys to play with and master. This is always something of great excitement on farms, so much so that farmers have been found hidden away in country pubs discussing the intricacies of their latest toys and ideas.

Firstly, after 11 years of excellent service, we have replaced our German built seed planting drill wit a younger, leaner, British model.  When we bought the original machine, it was a radical step in our approach to crop establishment, and being in the first half dozen people in the country to buy such a machine, it created a fair bit of interest among our neighbouring farmers.  Moving to a new drill built a mere eight years ago in Suffolk by a family farming manufacturer Claydon, it is more of a progression of the system.  Saying this, we have, at the same time ordered a straw rake from Claydon, which has still to be built.  With a serial number of 006, it appears to be not much further than a prototype model.  Again, when it arrives, it will no doubt cause some interest, and I will talk about the benefits I hope it will bring at a later date.

Our second investment is the long planned GPS technology for acurate fertiliser placement.  This ha taken several months of planning in order to get all the various pieces of technology to talk to one another: GPS received; electronic switching gear; monitoring software; web based infra-red mapping system; all brought together by a memory card I bought from a high street electrical good retailer.

The end result is to use the satellite field image showing a range of colours, where red shows poor crop growth, through to dark green showing good growth, as a tool to plan exactly what fertiliser is needed for each part of the field.  The information is programmed on the office computer, before being transferred to the tractor via the memory card where the GPS and other gizmos can vary the rate of fertiliser applied to the crop as you make your way across the field.  This is a genuine space age technology being used for financial and sustainable benefit at a farm level.  However, far from making the farmer redundant, his skill and experience are required to identify why crops may not be performing so well in certain areas.  It could be from pest damage or weed competition, to water logged soils or soils lacking specific nutrients for example.  The more information we can gather, the better chance we have of using it. On the field shown the answer is a simple one: the red area is on the top of a slope where the soil is poor, running down to a valley rich in fertile soils.