August 23, 2021
The latest edition of the Agricology newsletter focuses on “building resilience through growing more diverse, alternative crops, genetic diversity, working with nature to control weeds, varietal testing, and integrating trees into the farming system”. Agricology is an organisation which believes in “practical sustainable farming regardless of labels”.
One of the key features of the newsletter is an in-depth profile of grower Andy Dibben, who takes a whole system approach to vegetable production at Gloucestershire’s Abbey Home Farm in the United Kingdom. Andy is responsible for the 15 acre horticultural operation on the 1,600 acre farm, which has been organic for the past 30 years, and has turned to trees to improve the farm’s resilience against winds, heavy rain and drought.
“My approach for producing organic fruit and veg is a systems approach, so I don’t look at irrigation, pest control, planting and weeding separately,” he explains in the profile. “The system is set up as one whole organic system and trees are integral to this. Strips of wildflowers are planted throughout the cropping areas to provide habitat for pollinating and predatory insects, we also have permanent untilled grassy strips throughout the cropping areas to provide habitat for beetles that are our primary defence against slugs. We manage our fertility and feed our healthy soils with green manures which also provide year-round habitat and food for small mammals, invertebrates and bird life.”
Andy is also part of a group of growers sharing knowledge and experience of increasing diversity in protected crops as part of the DiverIMPACTS project. This year the group are trialling Caliente mustard as a biofumigant and are looking to increase wildflowers in polytunnels to attract beneficial insects.
The profile takes the opportunity to highlight a number of useful outputs from both the DiverIMPACTS and DIVERSify projects. These include the DIVERSify Guide for Farmers and Agronomists or ‘InfoHub’, which is part of the project’s aim “to optimise the performance of crop species mixtures or ‘plant teams’ to improve yield stability, reduce pest and disease damage, and enhance stress resilience in agricultural systems”.
There is also an introduction to a DiverIMPACTS Practice Abstract, compiled by Wageningen University and Research, on designing strip intercropping systems. The Agricology introduction to this resource, reports: “Strip intercropping creates spatial diversity within fields, which helps support biodiversity and beneficial insects and related ecosystem services such as biocontrol of pests and diseases.”
Other resources introduced in the profile include DIVERSify’s Growing Beyond Monoculture mini-web series, which present findings from the project’s research trials and includes interviews with researchers and farmers, and the project’s report on the key mechanisms promoting the performance of plant teams.
For more information:
- Read the Agricology newsletter here
- Read the Andy Dibben profile here
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