Farmers battle to keep the farm productive
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Farmers are waging a daily war to keep their farm productive. Find out what they are doing on the battlefield to strengthen their allies and win the war.
Posts
The vexing question of animal welfare
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Animal welfare is certainly a subject about which most people will have something to say. Most people’s opinions are firmly held and are based on their beliefs, culture and traditions, rather than on factual evidence. The broader community needs to understand that animal welfare is a very complex and multifaceted subject which cannot be reduced to one box.
Case study: The journey to sustainability
Reading Time: 9 minutes
The SWAN system is composed of soil, water, atmosphere and nutrient components. The best way to show how these integrated and interrelated measures reflect the journey of improving agricultural sustainability is to show a case study of a farm which has become more sustainable over the past five years.
Five benefits of multi-species pastures
Reading Time: 3 minutes
The benefits of multispecies pasture are not only limited to the benefits mentioned in this blog, they are far greater. I have isolated these ones because they are the most pertinent and directly relate to farm profitability.
Meet Rufus Dreyer: a dairy farmer, aviator and emerging photographer
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Having been in the dairy industry for just over 10 years, Rufus Dreyer is one of the early adopters of sustainable dairy farming practices in the area. He runs a farm just outside Humansdorp, close to Oyster Bay. Find out more about Rufus and his insights about dairy farming.
The silver bullet illusion
Reading Time: 2 minutes
The unfortunate truth is that there are no silver bullets in farming. The agro-ecosystem is way too complex, with far too many interactions, to have a simple, single solution to challenges.
See your farm as a system
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Nutrients are brought into the farm through the farm gate, and nutrients are removed through the farm gate. The question that needs to be asked is, are there more nutrients brought into, or removed from the farm system?
Playing smart politics with your soil
Reading Time: 2 minutes
If farmers could challenge themselves and stop applying excessive nutrients in the form of fertiliser, especially N, and rather focus on building soil carbon, that would force the soil organisms to start working (mineralise organic matter) for their own nutrients.
Do you know how much food your cows require?
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Our philosophy about sustainable agriculture is about limiting inputs from outside a farm system to what is strictly necessary. One of the inputs that is often over-imported, wastefully so, is feed.
Using minerals efficiently: Tsitsikamma dairy farm case study
Reading Time: 3 minutes
A supply of nutrients and minerals to soils which is greater than the amount needed to maintain soil health and fertility actually endangers the soil and can negatively impact on surface and ground water sources.