Chris Lovie at Dunecht Home Farm is looking forward to beating clubroot with a new resistant variety and other cultural methods Widening rotations and choosing clubroot resistant oilseed rape varieties are key strategies being taken to reduce the threat of club root at Dunecht Home Farms, Aberdeenshire. Just more than 550ha of the 1000ha farm is dedicated to arable crops, 30ha is rented out for seed potatoes and there are 100 cows and 2200 ewes at the low-ground farm. Farm manager, Chris, Lovie said: “Although we are a mixed farm, before I started working here two years ago, they used to run a tight arable rotation, with lots of brassicas for grazing sheep through the winter. This led to incidences of clubroot, and we are now working to manage this threat.”
Farmers Weekly Awards 2020: Arable Adviser of the Year >More in
Mark Dewes is the 2020
Farmers Weekly Arable Adviser of the Year.
Mark Dewes is a passionate and dedicated agronomist who has he best interests of his customers – and their farming enterprises – at the forefront of his mind. His willingness to uncover the best forward-thinking solutions on their behalf makes him the deserving recipient of this award.
Optimising farm returns while reducing risk for growers is all part of the bespoke service offered by forward-thinking agronomist Mark Dewes.
Covering four counties across central England, Mark has developed a risk share model that ensures he is financially accountable for his crop management decisions, while sharing risk and reward between agronomist and grower.