What is soil that works for you?
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Attaining soils that are working for you is a process. It starts with figuring out where your soils currently are. This will determine the next steps.
Publication to assist farmers with wetland and river management
Reading Time: 2 minutes
The aim of the publication is to provide best management practices that will assist farmers to manage their rivers and wetlands in a manner that promotes biodiversity conservation.
Minimise soil disturbance and build soil health.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Physical soil disturbances are a well-documented and well-understood concept; however, we underestimate the disturbances that result from chemical and biological processes.
Protozoa and protozoa tea
Reading Time: 4 minutes
What are protozoa? Protozoa are microbes beneficial to soil health. They help to cycle nutrients such as nitrogen as well as attract earth worms. Find here instructions to make your own protozoa tea to inoculate the soil.
What is it worth not to change?
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Can we afford not to change when we look beyond the individual farm and look at the entire agricultural industry and the way food is produced? What will it cost environmentally, and long-term economically, if we do not change?
Green lacewings
Reading Time: 3 minutes
What on earth is a green lacewing? This question might have been on many of the Trace & Save farmers’ minds in 2020 with the new biodiversity survey we’ve implemented. This article will answer the questions: what is a green lacewing and why is it relevant to a pasture-based dairy farm? We want to highlight green lacewings for the biocontrol species that they are, and even more importantly what their presence on a farm indicates – a healthy agro-ecosystem.
Water movement in the soil: Important notes for irrigation management
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Irrigation should not be applied uniformly in fields because soil differs in structure and texture. Understanding water movement dynamics for individual fields are very important for irrigation scheduling.
Could compost tea be part of the solution?
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Compost tea, if used correctly, can help reduce the use of harmful pesticides through the introduction of beneficial microbes and at the same time bring nutrients that are essential for plant growth and soil functions.
Understanding the black gold of the earth – humus.
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Humus is a stabilized fraction of organic matter and is a general term referring to a heterogeneous mixture of different humic substances.
Living roots are key
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Soils have become high nutrient input systems resulting in the use of substantial amounts of synthetic fertiliser to grow our crops. There is a simple solution to this problem, we need to feed our “underground herds”