Ah, June – the month of sun, Cereals and blackgrass. To be honest, I am very much frustrated by all three.

I can’t do much about the sun but I did seem to be at least drawing with the blackgrass. Over the past couple of years I have had no need to call in pullers or spot sprayers to control the pesky grassweed.

However, this year, cultural options such as herbal leys, two-year legume fallows and hybrid barley – all of which have given me success in the past – instead seem to have had the opposite effect and landed me with more of the blessed weed.

See also: Can delayed drilling be replaced in blackgrass control programmes?

About the author

Andy Barr

Andy Barr farms 320ha in mid-Kent, aiming to farm as regeneratively as possible. He stopped ploughing 25 years ago and over this time restructured the business with less land farmed and increased the use of contractors, environmental areas and diversification projects.

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Perhaps, it will be as a contemporary of my father said, when I asked him recently how it was going. His reply was that “if I live to be 200 I might become a decent farmer”.

I was frustrated at the Cereals event, not because I didn’t enjoy it as much as usual, but because many of the potential game-changers I’ve seen in recent years such as drones, robots, breeding techniques, big data and carbon neutral fertilisers do not seem to have progressed any further in actually changing the game.

For my increased blackgrass, for example, I will inevitably have to return, at least in part, to older tried-and-tested techniques.

I am currently just about to order more imported nitrogen, and even the robots I had tried to get in action here have reached a dead end.

So, with the general election imminent I took a deep breath – and some anti-nausea pills – and read summaries of several of the main political parties’ manifestos, regarding agriculture and the environment, to see if there might be any help in the offing.

Although there are ample great intentions to help nature, house building and renewable energy, all these commitments take up more land.

If this is to happen, there is a need for a massive investment in practical on-farm agri-technology developments, in order to feed more people with fewer resources. But, as far as I can see, this is glaringly omitted.