We're on a clay loam soil in Suffolk, following a winter wheat crop. The Nitrogen Climate Smart project is looking to set up side by side comparisons of beans with alternative crops to see the impact on the following crop. We therefore took the middle part of a 9 acre field of winter beans to sow 2 24m tramlines of winter wheat as a central block, sown in early November 2024.
Having worked for the past two years at Anglo American I was also interested in testing the benefit of the polyhalite product POLY4 across the beans and wheat. We marked out two tramline widths in a perpendicular direction, spanning an old field boundary, and applied 200kg/ha of POLY4 in early March 2025.
I set up the trial plan on the new ARC farm trials platform developed with Data Farming - https://arc.datafarming.com. This allows us to look at past spatial variation from satellite data and enables real time monitoring of satellite NDVI imagery through the season.
We'll be monitoring the effect of the polyhalite on the crop through leaf tissue analysis through the YEN, and assessing any difference in nodulation. Check this page for updates.
Soil Mineral N analysis in February from Hill Court Farm Research showed low levels of residual N to 60cm, with slightly more in the beans area (25 vs 18 kg N/ha). However, at this stage given the small size of the crop, and that the majority of the difference was in the deeper 30-60 soil horizon, this difference must be due to underlying soil variation rather than N fixation by the beans.
