THE CROPTEC SHOW Speaker Profiles
Speaker Profiles Emma Hamer Senior plant health adviser, NFU EMMA Hamer is the senior plant health adviser at the NFU, advising members on plant health and crop protection issues. She also contributes to the work of the Voluntary Initiative and the National Register of Sprayer Operators. Her role involves working closely with NFU members, research institutes, agrochemical companies, and regulators both in the UK and Brussels to lobby for risk-based regulation to ensure farmers have access to the actives they need to grow their crops effectively. Areas which are of particular relevance to Emma are keeping actives available for UK growers, resistance management and encouraging uptake of stewardship to enable the safe, sustainable use of plant protection products. She is a member of the BASIS professional register. Previous roles include working in agriculture, in the plant breeding industry, and as a plant health and seeds inspector at Defra. She also has a small beef and arable farm in north Oxfordshire which she runs with her husband and family.
Brian Barker AHDB monitor farmer and AHDB strategic farm BRIAN Barker runs his family-owned 485ha (1,198-acre) farm and contracting business. The farm is situated in the clay lands of mid-Suffolk and is farmed with the long-term aim to produce high yielding crops without impacting on farmland biodiversity and historical landscape. A traditional but flexible 12-year rotation has always been used, built around herbage grass-seed production integrating both winter and spring crops to reduce the risk associated with intensive farming. A flexible cultivation system has been created allowing Brian to reduce establishment costs for all crops by 45%. The purchase of a strip-till drill and a direct drill has given a full suite of establishment techniques with the historical non-inversion and plough-based equipment being retained, so the most appropriate technique can be used for each individual field. Brian closely monitors all his crops with biomass cuts, plant counts and theoretical yield calculations, with the view of farming to ‘potential yield’ and not ‘hope yield’.
Guy Smith Essex farmer and NFU vice-president GUY Smith farms a mixed and diversified family farm in north-east Essex. He served for eight years on NFU council as the Essex delegate. Other NFU positions include four years as a member of the governance board and six years as chairman of the NFU communications group. Guy is also a trustee of Farming and Countryside Education (FACE) and a past chairman of the Landskills new entrants committee. He has also recently served on the board of HGCA, retiring in March 2014. Guy is a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society and recipient of an honorary doctorate for services to agriculture from Essex University. Ian Matts Arable director, Brixworth Farming IAN Matts is a partner in his family farm and arable director at Brixworth Farming, a joint venture farming business in Northamptonshire. Having moved to more spring cropping over the last few years to help with the fight against black-grass, but with variable results, cropping now consists of mainly winter combinable crops – wheat, barley, OSR and beans. The one spring crop which has proved beneficial is spring barley, which is grown in rotation with a cover crop mixture, to help deal with some of the more problematic black-grass. Soil types are predominantly heavy clays (Hanslope and Denchworth series), however most fields have a large amount of variability with some Banbury series loams also featuring. Ian is also a member of AICC as an independent agronomist with BFC Agronomy.
THE CROPTEC SHOW 2017
Dr Francesca Salinari Research and development projects co-ordinator, Agrii DR Francesca Salinari joined Agrii in 2013 as R&D projects co-ordinator. In 2007 she received a PhD from the University of Turin (Italy). This explored the effect of climate change on plant disease. Following this, she carried out post-doctoral research on plant disease modelling. In the last eight years she has been developing and adapting decision support systems for commercial use by agricultural users in both Italy and the UK. At Agrii she specialises in services for crop protection targeted at agronomists and their farmer customers, making use of weather data from the extensive Agrii weather stations network. She also participates in collaborative national and international research projects, aiming to develop tools and services based on new technologies and innovative approaches for supporting decisions around disease control.