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Trust but verify

The heading for this blog is a quote from President Reagan made during the nuclear disarmament talks with the then USSR. It is something that should always be borne in mind when reading articles or listening to talks, even those by industry experts. There …

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Mind the gap

We have just returned from holiday and as the flight was on its descent into Stansted I witnessed a true cost of the failure to control black-grass effectively with herbicides. The spring barleys on the Essex clays did not look well. This is not …

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Wheat yields 2018

The very hot and dry weather continues. My galvanised watering can was much used in 1976 and the same can is now starting to leak in 2018. Perhaps I should buy a new one but I suspect that there may be a run on them. The watering can was bought in 1974 …

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Looking back to the future

I have been motivated to emerge from blogging retirement by the latest AHDB Project Report on applied nitrogen (N) doses for feed winter wheat. As regular readers of my blogs know, I have a ‘thing’ about the subject. This is because field trials data do …

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Wheat yields 2018

The summer of 2018 is clearly summed up by the autumnal picture of a banana tree in Clare College gardens, just down river from our house in Cambridge. It was hot and also it was very dry from late April onwards. In the UK, dry summers are often …

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Read this before leaf tissue testing for micronutrients

The great Gordon Banks is dead. I regularly sat behind the goal at Leicester City’s Filbert Street ground in the very early 1960’s and witnessed his sublime skills. The fulsome tributes reflect that he was blessed with a true richness of talent which, …

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Light fantastic

During the 1960s there were many films on the telly and at the cinema that were set in California. Looking back they were pretty awful. On the other hand, they were great advertisements for the Californian way of life. One thing that really impressed me …

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Is it all downhill?

'I was there' and witnessed Ben Stokes turning the third Ashes test match upside down. In a blog a few years ago I said we were present on super-Saturday at the London Olympic Stadium and saw the Team GB win three athletics gold medals. It seems that a …

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Orson's Oracle: 1World Agronomy

  We have recently been to see the stage show Tina... It is about the life of Tina Turner and what a life it has been - and what a show! We actually saw Ike and Tina Turner in the late 1960s when they performed at the University of Reading. It was a …

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