There has been an explosion in no-till and low till farming in the UK as energy prices (no till uses less diesel) and fertilizer prices spiked. Cover crops to avoid bare soil became big news.

But how do you kill the cover crop so you can grow wheat again? How do you kill the weeds? The answer for hundreds of years has been ploughing, but that is exactly what we are trying to avoid. The only viable answer today is...Roundup (glyphosate).

And there is the rub. To farm with better soil health, and less ploughing today requires a chemical that we are not happy with using.

A robot to pull the wild oats out of a wheat field sounds practical. A robot to pull 100 acres of white mustard and weeds is what?

There is some work with special rollers that can kill leafy cover crops, and there are tractor pulled mowers, of course, but it is a partial solution. Afterwards you still have a field of dandelions and black grass. So they use roundup.

Then there is the break crop issue. After wheat you would plant rape or beans, perhaps, but only rape will make you a profit, but this is a tremendous risk. A flea beetle outbreak will kill the entire crop. The solution until recently was neonicitinoid coated seed, but that is now banned. So what do you grow?

Part of the solution for me is mixed farming. Wheat followed by fodder beet, graze it off by sheep. Also the drought tolerant lucerne (Alfalfa to the rest of the world). Then seed grass and put cows or sheep (and hat and silage) followed by poultry (bird flu dependent) in a paddock grazing system. Then plough it and back to wheat.

Smaller automated machines could allow smaller fields and a more diverse patchwork I suppose. Cooperation needs to increase massively between farms, so a dairy farm partners with a arable farmer on one side and a sheep farmer on the other.

All depending on your soil type and topography of course. Lots of ground is grazing only.

Then you need to make the economics work. Small farms don't pay. Of course 1000 acres of mountain ground is totally different to 1000 acres of flat arable ground.

We definitely need some innovative in the economics. The current model of subsidy is laughable. Farmers being incentivised to grow no crops at all can't be the answer to food security!

I would love to work in this sector. I feel with better automation and better economics we could make smaller farms that are more like a market garden with many different crops could work. A practical (and cheap) way to harvest grain on a small field would be the biggest breakthrough for me.