A mixed cover crop on Furlongs farm.
Walter Furlong Grain s tillage farm in Co Wexford is sequestering 636kg CO2/ac. The farm is sequestering more carbon than it is producing, with no reward.
In the meantime, agriculture is coming under increasing pressure to reduce emissions, despite not being able to take account of sequestration, and the tillage area has declined by 40,000ha in four years (2015-2018) with little notice by officials.
At the Irish Tillage and Land Use Society’s (ITLUS) summer webinar, Wally Furlong explained that his father Walter has been farming since 1980 and moved to minimum tillage in 2001. He describes this in the short video below.
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The Irish Tillage and Land Use Society s (ITLUS s) summer field evening takes place online on 3 June.
The Irish Tillage and Land Use Society s (ITLUS) summer field evening takes place online on 3 June at 7.30pm.
Farmers John Monahan and John O Neill will share their experiences of chopping straw, which is now routine on their farms.
Over the past few weeks, the ITLUS council was busy visiting the farms to make short videos describing what s happening and viewers will have a chance to ask questions after the presentations.
John Monahan establishes crops using minimum tillage and John O Neill is operating a plough-based system, so there is something for all.
Peanut plants were grown in beds.
Farming close to the coast south of Bundaberg in Queensland (QLD), Jack and Chris Russo run the Cruso Industries family business.
QLD has long been associated with sugar cane production and this farm used to be a big producer of that crop.
However, falling profitability has resulted in substantial acreage decline in this traditional area where the local sugar processor in Bundaberg finds a home for some of its molasses for the production of rum in the same town.
The local plant used to produce up on 1.5Mt of sugar, but that is now down to 1Mt and lower.
Two self-propelled Case sprayers cover 100ha per hour when working.
Farming 8,300ha roughly north-northeast of Esperance, Western Australia, Sam Defrenne described himself as a dryland farmer, with roughly 350mm of annual rainfall.
He might normally get around 250mm during the growing season alone, but when ITLUS visited him in January 2020, he had received a total of 179mm for 2019, with inevitable consequences for crop yields.
He is a crop farmer, growing mainly wheat, barley and canola or oilseed rape.
Unlike all the other farmers we visited in Western Australia, Sam had no sheep or other livestock as part of the business.