Taking the Lead in Soil Improvement

The Soil & Water Management Centre is a national Agrii initiative with Harper Adams University College and leading businesses and organisations to improve the productivity and resilience of UK farming through more careful management of its two most important resources.

Also including Vaderstad, Controlled Traffic Farming, GrowHow, The Cooperative Farms, AGCO Challenger, Michelin, Interagro, BASIS, NRM Laboratories and the Rothschilds Education Trust as founder partners, the initiative is widely supported by leading specialists and organisations throughout the farming community.

It has secured three-year funding to develop a permanent centre at Harper Adams with a director and new chair of Soil and Water Management.

“Modern food production systems – not to mention climate change – are putting our two most vital agricultural assets under more pressure than ever before,” stresses senior Agrii agronomist, Andrew Richards who chairs the initiative.

“Across the country we’re seeing the direct result of this pressure in soils with increased compaction, reduced biological activity and an impaired capacity to buffer both drought and flood.

“We’re putting soil and water management firmly where it needs to be – at the centre of UK agricultural improvement efforts,” he insists. “Most encouragingly, we’re getting all sides of the industry working together to a common goal; a goal which appreciates that all our farming futures depend, more than anything else, on the healthiest, most productive, most weather-tolerant soils.”

For more information, please contact:

David Langton at david.langton@www.agrii.co.uk or Andrew Richards at andrew.richards@www.agrii.co.uk