NUTRIENT BUDGETING AT JAMES HUTTON INSTITUTE, CENTRE FOR SUSTAINABLE CROPPING BY ANDREW CHRISTIE FIELD AGRONOMIST The Centre for Sustainable Cropping at the James Hutton Institute’s Balruddery farm was set up in 2009 as a platform for evaluating the long-term impacts of an integrated cropping system on whole-system sustainability. The Integrated system, which applies direct drill, cover cropping, precision farming, reduced and targeted input techniques, is compared to a conventional, plough based, highly intensive system on six crops in rotation, covering the most widely grown arable crops in the UK (potatoes, winter wheat, winter barley, winter oilseed rape, field beans and spring barley). From an agronomist’s perspective, the platform, which is the first of its scale in the UK, offers an opportunity to test new developments on the Integrated, direct drilling system and apply ideas already proven in other territories to a North-East Scotland context. This provides an opportunity to extend no-till systems from the dryland areas where these techniques were pioneered to new regions posing a completely different set of challenges and requiring novel solutions. Nutrient Use Efficiency forms an integral part of the overall integrated management system which iteratively applies and tests new techniques to improve environmental and economic sustainability and transition towards a system which would now be classed under the umbrella term of regenerative agriculture. Techniques being applied are as follows:
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