By Iain Tolhurst, Tolhurst Organic Partnership CIC
Pumpkins in rain
As growers, we face a regular barrage of potential threats to our farms. The weather is generally responsible for the most difficult of these problems and we are not able to change that. However, we can build resilience into our farming systems, to reduce the negative impacts that this can have. We have gone a long way to achieve this on our own farm and feel fairly confident that we have a strong resilient system built up of almost half a century of studying the environment within which we live and work, and working closely with nature’s own systems of management.
I am in regular contact with many growers, not just within the UK, from further afield, and get to hear the problems and issues that they are having to deal with on their farms. Three such problems have been cropping up quite regularly over the past year, two of them are partly influenced by the weather.