West Lothian Soil & Nutrient Network: Soil Health & Nutrient Use – Event summary

Second meeting of the West Lothian Soil & Nutrient Network

The penultimate meeting for the West Binny soil and nutrient work farm was held at Oatridge College during December 2017.

Bulky organic manures & fertiliser recommendations

After a brief introduction Audrey Litterick from Earthcare Technical delivered her talk on bulky organic manures. Many of the attendees were already using their own manures and some were buying in other manures such as anaerobic digestate, this provided good conversation and peer to peer learning.

Craig Bothwell took the attendees through a calculation of how to work out bagged fertiliser recommendations for silage and cropping based on the available nutrients from organic manures.  You can read Craig’s presentation slides here.

Soil sampling & soil compaction

Jonathan Black presented the GPS soil analysis for Oatridge farm and highlighted the numerous benefits of this precision approach to pH.  Read Jonathan’s presentation slides for more information.

Finally, Gavin Elrick delivered a presentation on soil compaction and how to deal with it, something which has been a big problem this year.

Downloadable information related to the topics discussed at this meeting are available below.

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This was one of a series of three meetings of this SNN group.  You can read read the meeting summary from the first meeting here.

There are a total of 12 SNN groups throughout Scotland and meetings are free to attend and open to all and you don’t have to have attended any of the previous meetings to go along. You can read meeting notes and case studies of previous SNN farms at Farming & Water Scotland‘s webpage.

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