Inverness Soil & Nutrient Network: Second Meeting – Event Summary

Flowerburn Mains – Update

At the second of three Soil and Nutrient Network meetings on the Black Isle local farmers came along to participate with AHDB’s Emily Grant & SAC consultants Gillian McKnight and Derek Hanton, to discuss soil analysis results, soil organic matter results and using GPS soil analysis.

Compaction

Emily Smith’s talk covered research undertaken on soil compaction, the impacts of machinery and the number of passes of machinery; the effects on the soil functionality and how to reduce or combat these impacts.

Field visit – seeing it all in action

The field visit helped put the talks into a practical context, with AHDB’s Gavin Dick comparing the soil  structure from the field edge and in-field, highlighting compaction layers and how to reduce these.

The host farmer, Graham MacIver of Flowerburn Mains  discussed how he was using the soil analysis and GPS soil mapping results to target lime and reduce costs.

You can download the GPS soil mapping presentation slides used by Derek Hanton here & the Flowerburn Mains meeting 2 update slides here.

This was one of a series of three meetings of this SNN group.  You can read read the meeting summary from the first meeting here.

There are a total of 12 SNN groups throughout Scotland and meetings are free to attend and open to all and you don’t have to have attended any of the previous meetings to go along. You can read meeting notes and case studies of previous SNN farms at Farming & Water Scotland‘s webpage.

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