Blogs

The weather dictates everything in farming whether you are an arable or livestock farmer. For us as an arable farm cultivations, spraying operations and harvesting are all at the mercy of the weather. Crop growth is also very much affected by the weather. © Andy Hay, RSPB Images When wheat...

August is really the end of the farming year as the final crops are harvested, here at least, and also marks the end of the breeding season. So it seems a good time to do a round-up of how our harvest went and how our breeding birds fared. Both the crops and the wildlife on the farm are heavily influenced...

2012 is a truly auspicious year in Britain, with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and a certain sporting event that cannot be named for legal reasons. But it is also an auspicious year in the sleepy Cambridgeshire hamlet of Knapwell, home to Hope Farm , the RSPB’s 180 hectare arable farm. Changing...

Guest post from Charmian Flowerday, RSPB Project Manager Last Monday was quite a special day for me – Now don’t get me wrong, I know that going to visit a farm in a small village in Cambridgeshire to see construction work might not be everyone’s idea of an inspiring way to spend...

Lapwings, along with skylarks, are iconic farmland birds, easily recognised by anyone. The lapwings’ calls, as they swoop over the fields displaying, is one of the first signs that spring has arrived and winter has broken. Once a common breeding bird across most of Britain, numbers have declined...

Following 18 months of drought conditions, we have had the wettest April since we bought the farm. This has been welcome news for our crops, which are looking much better for it, and for the environmental features we established last autumn: wild bird seed mixtures to feed our birds this winter and pollen...

By Derek Gruar, Senior Researcher, Hope Farm One of the core tasks here at Hope Farm is monitoring the numbers of birds that are actually using the farm. In summer this requires walking the farm boundaries and recording birds that are seen and heard onto maps. Compared to winter this is straight...

Blog post by: Richard Winspear, Senior Agriculture Advisor RSPB I had a great couple of days at the Oxford Farming Conference. We hosted a breakfast fringe meeting to celebrate the winners of the Nature of Farming Awards 2011 and launched the first Farmland Bird Friendly Zone. Martin Harper, our new...

By Niki Williamson, Fenland Farmland Bird Adviser We like overwintered stubble in the Fens. It helps prevent the notorious ‘fen blow’, a terrifying local weather phenomenon, where dark clouds of loose peat blast across the countryside like black sandstorms, making it look like the end...