From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
Ozzie farmer has the answer to Norfolk’s “extreme weather”!!
An Australian farmer who has found green ways to grow crops in extreme heat and droughts has given advice to his Norfolk counterparts.
Grant Sims spoke at a virtual online meeting hosted by the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association and its Yield (Young, Innovative, Enterprising, Learning and Developing) rural business network.
With extreme weather becoming more common in East Anglia, he explained how he has optimised the health and resilience of his soils to cope with the rigours of an Australian summer.
He farms 8,500 acres in Victoria, including a 300-strong herd of Angus cattle.
He also runs Down Under Covers, a business which sells seasonal multi-species cover crop mixes to farmers across Australia.
And keeping soil covered with plants between commercial crops is one of the key “guiding principles” on his farm, which can receive less than 200mm of rain during the growing season, and often sees 40-degree heat and heavy storms in summer.
He said “cover is king”, helping insulate the soil and improve its biology, while a variety of root depths breaks up compaction and increase the water-holding capacity.
“One thing we are really focused on in our soil health is to improve that infiltration and water-holding capacity,” he said.
“Most of the time we look at the area we are farming two-dimensionally, but really we are farming a three-dimensional plane.
“So if we can increase the rooting depth and the water-holding capacity, we can make use of this out-of-season rainfall, store it, or grow something over the summer which has traditionally not been done – and that is where we implement our cover crops to get the diversity in.”
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/business/australian-farmer-grant-sims-speaks-to-norfolk-farmers-8628500
Somehow, I don’t quite see Norfolk turning into Victoria anytime soon!
But what about all of this extreme weather and drought, I hear you say!
As far as April to September rainfall is concerned, there is no trend whatsoever in East Anglia. Dry summers were just as common in the past:
https://www.ecad.eu/utils/showindices.php?ajgkeo7oovr2mbo7te9b62mrik
Neither are there any trends in October to March rainfall, nor evidence of unusually dry or wet years:
And with summer daytime temperatures averaging less than 23C, I would suggest Norfolk’s farmers have more things to worry about than the weather!
The fascination with climate change started years ago with the Express .
Back then it was advocating the use of solar arrays to combat climate change and to power the UK.
This was in foggy Norfolk.
Solar and wind are very unreliable.
East Anglia also produced the notorious climate gate emails.
As born in Norfolk from many generations, I am ashamed that this type of information is being published as fact.
CO2 fertilisation and a slight warming will be good for the farmers of Norfolk, if it eventuates.
In the meanwhile they need to lobby for a stable grid and cheap base load power, whatever floats their boat, or their industry will be marginalised against Australian and US competition. The free trade agreements will mature between the US, Australia and the UK.
We all need a strong economy.
I wish my home people of Norfolk the best of success.
Farmer says since 2008 decided to no longer use “… synthetic fertilizers, fungicides and insecticides …” but rather “… own biological fertilizers.” Then article about him says among strategies employed is to “… minimize chemicals and synthetic inputs…” so practicality apparently has sometimes come to the rescue.
There alternatives to this horrible vegicide:
Some may be interested in data for the winter North Atlantic Oscillation. The more negative in scale this tends to make the UK winter temperature relatively colder and precipitation relatively drier. While the more positive in scale this tends to make the UK winter temperature relatively milder and precipitation relatively wetter.
doesn’t look so much like an oscillation to me just a random walk…
And here is the data for the summer North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The more negative in scale tends to make UK summer temperature relatively cooler and precipitation relatively wetter. While the more positive in scale works relatively opposite. Of course in both summer or winter the NAO is not always static and so degrees of positive and negative occur.
Warmunistas blame the unusually bitter cold, windy and snowy winter in the US on the polar vortex’ being pushed south by a warmer Arctic.
Yet Arctic sea ice was higher yesterday than on that date in all but one year since and including 2005. The exception was 2009.
Pardon my expansion of your point.
Whenever the “vortex” pulls cold polar air southward from the north pole, it is at the same time, pulling warm southerly air northward into the arctic region.
I would guess that’s possible that a similar dynamic would be happening around the south pole during their local winter, but I have no data to confirm that.
The southern polar vortex, ie area of cold, low pressure air centered on the Ross Ice Shelf, can break out and even reach Oz.
IMO Arctic outbreaks don’t necessarily pull in warmer air. What I think happens is that the tropospheric vortex can be strong and tight or weak and wavy. In the latter case, outbreaks of cold air extend farther south than usual.
Yes, only 1 of the last 17 years has the “canary in the coal mine”, floating icemometers, followed the warminist story line…..at least as of late January…
Drawing a line over random data is a statistician’s trick to keep himself employed finding correlations that aren’t there. Your lines looks like you might be guilty of this too, gringo…
Except I did not generate that data nor compile it. Looks “like you might be guilty of” being selectively critical. The Original Post has 3 separate data charts with “a line drawn over” data which you neglect to elucidate upon.
Remembering the involvement by certain staff of the University of East Anglia some time ago, I am sure they will wish to express an opinion on this subject! But somehow a comparison between Norfolk and Victoria seems a little far-fetched to me!
The Eastern Daily Press , the media outlet involved in this story , has always been a very left wing propaganda organisation .With its ” EU good / UK bad ” , type stories and its support for unreliable power generation and global warming scare stories ..
So it is not surprising that they will come up with all sorts of rubbish .to try to promote the scam .
Just like the BBC , which had a ” Hottest day ever ” story a while ago , , which was taken from a temp gauge on Heathrow airport just after a lot of Jumbo jets had taken off or landed . [ Other gauges in the region showed 10C lower temps }
So we should expect all of this sort of lies from a lot of the media .
Or as Bob Dylan put it,
“While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in”
(It’s all Right Ma)
What the Aussie farmer is doing is beyond epic- he is a *true* climate and anti-desert hero.
Even before he keeps Aberdeen Angus cows = simply The Best
What he says/suggests is very applicable to Norfolk, because Norfolk is the closest the UK will ever get to having a prairie.
Which these days means huuuuge areas of ground given over to growing sugar. The production of same is what is hoisting atmospheric CO2 levels and (seemingly) driving thermometers, and Sputniks, equally as crazy mad as the folks who consume the sugar.
Because the production of sugar by conventional means creates deserts = dry places with low-to-zero soil organic matter (SOM). And the SOM is almost literally evaporating – simply exposing bare soil to sunlight does it and any water in the soil evaporates simultaneously.
What the Aussie guy is trying to explain and do is how to prevent that – and using cows running on permanent pasture is a *very* good way of doing that.
Running a few cows would have prevented the Climate Change that was the Boulder Grass-Fire Event.
Did the buffalo, millions of them and over 1000’s of years suffer constant grass and forests fires? How many Dust Bowls did they have to endure in all that time?
Were they in chronic ill-health, or constantly starving by eating an unsuitable diet. Did they make their ‘settled’ land into a desert.
Did Mankivitch, Natural Variations, the CCZTZZCCTTES, or the CCTZNINOHNOHNO or Solar TSI Spots make it into a desert while they were there?
Did they spend $10 Billion per day on healthcare?
The Aussie farmer is talking very good sense but because his ‘sense’ is so simple, so basic, so ‘agricultural’ and down-to-earth (small ‘e’) that he’s being derided from all sides.
If such pettiness, laziness, blindness, drunken stupidity and “Oh I’m too precious, I’m A Scientist doncha know” continue##, this CAN NOT end happily for *anyone* or ‘anything* on this Earth
And it’s not as if i hasn’t happened before inside the last 10,000 years.
## One word: = Ukraine.
No, make that two: Afghanistan and previously: Viet-nam
people, wrap up warm
edit: sp
Sorry to disappoint you, but Norfolk is not known for sugar growing. That would be the clays and peats of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire more. But even there potatoes and wheat are often more profitable.
Ah Leo. You don’t speak Petaese apparently. Wheat and taters are sugar according to Peta.
I live in East Anglia, in Norwich and I am 80 so I remember our weather way back. We just don’t get any extreme weather anymore for a long time now. No drought, no violent storms, hardly any snow. The bad weather that hits the north and sometimes the west almost always misses us. East Anglia is nothing like anywhere in Australia.
Honestly,,,,,,,,,,, this is England. Sometimes it rains , sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes it’s not….. Sometimes we can guess the weather, most times we can’t…..get over it Norfolk……
Norfolk would mostly be fens, anyway, without millennia of drainage by humans.
Current temperatures (C) in the southern US.
Gee. Think normal people are fearful of CAGW?
Amazing. This is nothing more than fear-mongering to the ignorant, which I would think is not the kind of people who actually do commercial farming in Norfolk (or anywhere else) and the target audience is more likely to be the cloistered, trendy, metropolitan survivalists whose focus is selling their window box crops on Etsy.
And to get it out of the way, I know for a fact that a foreign race of primitive hunter/gatherers, completely ignorant of regional soil conditions and weather, have not recently arrived to settle in Norfolk. So, they don’t need to be brought up speed on century old knowledge about maintaining soil organics, soil content profiles and best cover practices. Neither do they have zero experience on pairing best crops to growing season and even if all this isn’t completely etched in their memories, that’s easily addressed via regular instances of barn and kitchen talk with more senior neighbors so there is no need to fly in foreigners hardly more experienced than the couple down the road.
I’m guessing that any farmer worth his salt would want to optimise the health and resilience of his soils. Never mind the climate change crap.
There are a couple of handy charts in this – one shows that temp change is highest in the UK in E Anglia, the other shows it least affected by the ^% increase in UK rainfall from 30 years ago.
Climate change continues to be evident across UK – Met Office
Hoo-ha! If one actually read the Met Office report one would be left with the impression that UK rain and temperature trends were good for people. Government propaganda is manifest.
The story concerns drought but you tell us endlessly that rain in UK has increased 6% since your entirely arbitrary cherry picked starting point.
So is it wetter or dryer?
Or does that depend on wind direction and the story of the day?
That would be the same Met Office, which, only a few years ago warned of severe drought conditions the week before record rainfall descended. Not to mention barbecue summers.
Plus, we now have climate zealots worrying about conservatories causing overheating in the UK.
It really is becoming a total and utter joke.
“a three-dimensional plane”? Seriously…
Yes, that makes sense, talking about subsoil moisture
A 3D shell perhaps. A plane is 2D by definition. A 3D plane is like a fat point.
He’s a farmer not a mathematician. He’s looking at a thick plane (down to root depth) not a mathematically thin one.
Growing cover crops is as old as farming, this is a rediscovery of things I saw being done 60 odd years ago.
Regardless of the climate of East Anglia, Grant Sims‘s advice to farmers is sound and important for farmers in Australia (where he also farms and runs cattle.) Cover-cropping is becoming quite the things, even in Upstate New York , where cover cropping and alternating crops with cover, even in the same fields a the same time, are increasing yields and preventing erosion.
Kip & Kevin, + others
FYI Recently I finished an interesting book called “Kiss the Ground” by Josh Tickell.
Its on Regenerative Agriculture where the main tenets are 1) year-round cover crops,
2) use of trees & managed herd grazing, 3) composting, and 4) no-tilling.
There is a Netflix film of the same name as the book that was entertaining. It has some of the typical climate alarmism (mercifully low key) but emphasizes that we need to get more carbon back into the soil. I’m not a farmer but the premise of it all seems logical.
Trailer: https://kissthegroundmovie.com/
B Z… ==> Thanks for the link.
There are many many things promoted under Climate Alarm that are Good Things (once the stink of alarmism has dispersed).
We should quit burning all that valuable oil in power plants, and should build Small Nuclear Reactors by the dozens.
When it becomes reasonable to use solar, when we can store that energy cheaply and long enough to be useful, we should.
We should have electric cars — the technology is almost available. Of course, we need to infrastructure to charge all those cars and that may take a couple of decades. The solution to the battery problem is near- to mid-term close.
Bottom Line: Just because climate alarmist push something, that doesn’t make it bad.
My wife and I homesteaded in the past, raising kids (first-most), and 80% of our food using techniques that were forward looking and which are now the standard for home and small farmers.