Now in its 10th year, the Innovative Farmers network is celebrating the success of more than 120 field labs – practical hands-on trials open to everyone – that have connected with about 12,000 UK farmers and put them in the driving seat of agricultural research.

Before the network was founded, agricultural research tended to be “top down” and not necessarily looking at what farmers wanted to know, says Liz Bowles, associate director farming and land use at the Soil Association.

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“At that time, research tended to be done into products rather than practices. Innovative Farmers is about practice change, where farmers have an inkling for what might work,” she says.

Initially, the programme catered for organic farmers through the Soil Association. However, other delivery partners – Linking Environment and Farming and Innovation for Agriculture – and a partnership with AHDB have helped Innovative Farmers reach out to conventional farmers.

“Today, 15-20% of active farms in the UK are engaged with the programme,” Ms Bowles explains.

“When we first set up Innovative Farmers, the idea of testing things on farm was not commonly done. It’s OK doing research in vitro, but if it is to work for farmers then they need to be involved.”

From a research perspective, organisations such as Adas and the Organic Research Centre (ORC) help ensure trials are robustly designed and that there is a control.

“Sometimes if something seems to be working, farmers carry on doing that without a control area to compare it with. For a successful trial they need one, otherwise they may not know what happened for the remainder of its duration.”

Innovative Farmers also gives researchers more contact with farmers, which helps them to learn too, she says.

Her ambition is to get more funding for farmer-led research. “In 2017, £450m was spent on agricultural research,” she says. “Less than 1% was for projects led by farmers. We want to see that figure rise to 10%.”

Farm trials

One farmer who has been involved in an Innovative Farmers field lab is James Hares, who farms organically at Highworth, near Swindon. He grows 130ha of arable crops, grass leys and permanent pasture, alongside a beef enterprise.

His father had run a field lab on composting, which first drew his attention to Innovative Farmers.

“I saw that there was a field lab on intercropping, something I was trying with Mulika wheat and Tundra beans sown in autumn 2017,” he says.

“Prior to this, when growing beans as a monocrop, we were unable to harvest about 75% of the crop as it was too weedy.”

Beans provide a good protein source for store cattle rations on the farm, and Mr Hares was considering feeding the wheat/bean mix without separating the crops.

However, he grew a greater proportion of wheat than intended, so he decided to separate them in order to get a balanced ration.

“We have been experimenting with the drill to see how little wheat we can get away with, but still grow a clean bean crop,” he says.

About four growers actively participated in the two-year field lab. As well as Mr Hares’ wheat and beans, intercropping trials on other farms included oats and linseed, oats and spring OSR, and peas and spring OSR.

Mr Hares says: “The fact that it was farmer-led takes into account the practicalities of farming – academics don’t think like farmers.

“I did a degree in zoology and taught science, but am now very much a farmer. It is good to have the two approaches.

“We had input from ORC researchers, bringing a standardised approach, so the data was repeatable and meant something even if it was on different soil types, for example.”

There was also support with weed identification and wheat protein analysis, which revealed that intercropping it with beans lifted protein levels. “We gained data that we could not obtain on our own,” he says.

Being able to share experience with other farmers in the field lab also brings new insights, says Mr Hares.

“We used WhatsApp to keep in touch and share advice. There were lessons we could learn from each other, and by having discussions we could troubleshoot.”

Results from the field lab showed that intercropping wheat with beans resulted in much lower weed biomass compared with the bean monocrop – 73% and 74% weed reduction in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Mr Hares says: “It worked. We are still experimenting with what ratio of wheat and beans to grow and how to establish the intercrop, but the field lab has helped us quantify what we are doing.”

Field lab research

Adas principal research entomologist Sacha White was involved with an Innovative Farmers field lab in the 2019 and 2020 seasons looking at defoliation of winter oilseed rape for cabbage stem flea beetle management.

The trial looked at defoliating OSR with machinery or sheep with the aim of killing the beetle larvae.

“Key findings were to defoliate as early as possible and to avoid defoliating too severely, so the OSR crop had time to recover,” Dr White says. “Although we had a good reduction in larvae, we mostly saw a yield reduction.”

There are lots of benefits to farmer-led trials, he says. “Research institute trials tend to be crop plot-style, and there can be problems extrapolating them to field scale.

 “They can be a great way of demonstrating effects to farmers and getting them to try different treatments.

“Farmer-led trials also offer two-way communication between researchers and farmers. It gives researchers a greater understanding of practical limitations that farmers have in terms of what they can do in crop management.”

Although crop plot-style trials can offer a level of replication which cannot be emulated in field trials, the latter can be a great way of seeing whether a treatment works on a variety of fields, says Dr White.

Some research topics particularly lend themselves to farmer-led trials. “With integrated pest management (IPM), for example, it can be difficult to see the benefit on a crop plot, but this can be more evident if you are looking at scales used in field labs,” he says.

“They can also be more suitable for some IPM approaches like trap crops, companion crops and flower strips or field margins. It is good to be able to look at these at scale rather than within the limitations of a crop plot.”

Knowledge exchange is one of the most important elements of field labs, says Dr White.

“It is great to sit in a room with farmers who are engaged enough to be part of the work and have different levels of experience. It is important that farmer-led trials increase.

“There are fewer research institutes and not a huge amount of funding out there. Farmers need to be able to run trials themselves and try things out.

 “Novel, sustainable crop practices will be adopted if farmers are more confident about running their own trials and seeing for themselves how things work.”