In 2020 ADAS launched ‘YEN Nutrition’ and thereby started to promote the value to farms of analysing the nutrients in their crop produce, starting with grains. Given the costs and importance of accurate crop nutrition, ADAS’s crop physiologists argue “to manage it well, you must measure it”
They address this to all farms and claim it can transform their nutrient management! From 2023, ADAS has led a Horizon project called NUTRI-CHECK NET that seeks to share this philosophy across European farms.
Inspired by these ADAS ideas, and to build on their collaboration on the NUTRI-CHECK NET project, the Danes have initiated a new project called ANAGRAIN specifically to introduce this approach across Denmark, and on 10th October 2023 crop nutrition experts from four Danish organisations [SEGES, the University of Copenhagen, FOSS and Danish Agro] visited ADAS Boxworth to learn how grain analysis is being organised and interpreted in the UK. FOSS, in Denmark, have even developed a new instrument that uses LIBS to easily measure nutrients in any organic material, such as grains.
The Danes had studied ADAS’s publications on ‘harvest analysis’ and challenged ADAS to say how grain analysis is interpreted for each farm. ADAS described how discussions go when meeting with farmers who have used YEN Nutrition, and the way in which farmers are using grain analysis to assess the success of their nutrition strategies. After some lively and constructive discussions the group resolved to collaborate into the future so that a ‘measure to manage’ philosophy can help farms across our countries and beyond use nutrients more efficiently and profitably, and help farms to meet the challenges set by the EU’s Green Deal.
