Fertility building strategies during the conversion period – assessment of performance in a stockless field vegetable rotation

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference of the Colloquium of Organic Researchers (COR). Nutrient off-takes, residue returns and nutrient inputs were measured during and after conversion from a conventional arable system to organic vegetables with cereals. This data was used to construct nutrient budgets to assess the effectiveness of contrasting fertility building strategies and various cropping regimes. The effect of placing the cereal crops in different places in the crop sequence was also considered

Sort Out Your Soil: A practical guide to green manures

The booklet is a compendium of green manures species used in UK. The introduction explains the reasons why to grow green manures and the benefits they bring into the system. What follows is a guide to the choice of the species to use as green manure, with details per species (leguminous species and other species) and some comparative assessments among the species. It is focused on UK climate and farming systems but its contents can easily be used also in other temperate environments. The booklet is clear and has several photos. This tool can be used to adapt strategies for green manure to specific case

A comparison of two models to predict nitrogen dynamics in organic agricultural systems

Two publicly available crop/soil models were compared. These were the EU-Rotate_N model (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eurotaten) and the NDICEA model (www.ndicea.nl). Each simulation was also compared to measured data from an organically managed site in the English Midlands. Results showed that, overall, EU-Rotate_N gave a better estimation of soil mineral nitrogen, particularly after the incorporation of a long-term fertility-building crop. This model has a lot of flexibility but is aimed at researchers and requires more work before it is ready to be used by farmers or advisors. The NDICEA model is much simpler to use with a user-friendly interface