The events, sponsored by BASF will be repeated on 5th, 7th, 20th and 21st November in Shropshire, Devon, Yorkshire and Essex respectively. 5 BASIS and NRoSO points applied for.
See the Soil & Water Management Centre’s events page for more details.
Themes and speakers
Professor Chris Collins (Reading University) will be asking 
the question; “How can we secure our supply of food using less land with lower inputs?” Chris is the co-ordinator of a multi-million euro research investment to understand how soils resist, recover and ultimately adapt to land use and climate change. The Soil Security Programme hopes to fill these knowledge gaps by adopting a novel, multi-disciplinary, multi-scale approach.
On sustainability Dr Emily Pope (AHDB) 
will speak about the Strategic Farm West platform which aims to integrate research and practical farming in a way that has the potential to change farming for the better. Trials are being conducted that test the results of research in a real farm environment and will communicate the full net-margin cost benefit of a particular strategy.
For the conferences in the east, Professor Roger Sylvester-Bradley, (ADAS) will be discussing the dos and don’ts of crop nutrients.
The western conferences will hear from Dr Jonathan Leake, (University of Sheffield) regarding the re-introducing grass leys into arable rotations to improve soil structure and nutrient use efficiency.
Various speakers from Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) will be on hand to discuss the practical techniques to reduce soil and nutrient losses from farming, and practical sessions will take a closer look at soil biology as well as Farmer Case Studies from the locality.