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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...

By Derek Gruar, Senior Research Assistant, Hope Farm After one of the wettest summer for years, winter continued the theme of damp and dull weather conditions; with the ground still saturated we like many farmers across the UK have struggled to get crops in for the 2013 harvest. This also made...

I am really getting into the festive mood. Our Christmas tree is decorated, my desk is surrounded by tinsel, and in the evenings I’m busy planning my Christmas menu. We’ll be having free range duck from a local farm, with cherry sauce and all the trimmings on the big day, followed by my mother...

The Nature of Farming Award Tour of the best entries in the East this year is now in full swing- starting last week with RSPB Eastern England Regional Director, Paul Forecast presenting the Award to the Regional Winner... read about the winner and the other events in the tour below- and then why not...

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...

By Derek Gruar, Senior Research Assistant, Hope Farm Ashoka (Grahame Madge) Since the RSPB took ownership of Hope Farm back in 2000, we have seen several bird species colonise the farm including grey partridge, lapwing and yellow wagtail. A firm favourite of these re-colonising species...

Every year, Hope Farm hosts the barbeque for our Conservation Science team, and this year all of the food was sourced from wildlife-friendly farmers, right down to the cooking oil! We had organic pork from our 2011 Welsh Nature of Farming Award winner, Gethin Owen, beef from LEAF Demonstration Farmer...

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...

Just in time for the summer weather - solar panels were installed at Hope Farm this week. This is part of a programme across many of the RSPB's offices and reserves (and our one commercial farm!) to help combat climate change. Read more about it here . In action at Hope Farm this week

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...