The Morley Agricultural Foundation

Direct Grants

Direct grants towards projects in agreed areas of arable farming research are available. The following are some of the projects currently being funded.

NIAB TAG

NIAB is a leading UK centre for plant science, crop evaluation and agronomy, with headquarters in Cambridge and regional offices across the country. With an internationally recognised reputation for independence, innovation and integrity, NIAB is ideally placed to meet the industry’s current and future research, information and knowledge transfer needs.  As NIAB TAG we conduct field crops research and provide impartial variety and husbandry information. The NIAB TAG knowledge base is drawn from extensive staff expertise, research data and field trials from over 20 locations in England. It is widely utilised by the agricultural community and through membership subscriptions influences more than 20% of the UK’s arable area.

NAC; The National Agronomy Centres (NAC) initiative is a charitably sponsored research programme delivered by The Arable Group (TAG).  The NAC sites are at Morley (funded through The Morley Agricultural Foundation), Andover and Caythorpe.  One of the key goals of the TAG National Agronomy Centres is to generate and highlight the value of independent, strategic research and to enable this level of essential and fundamental information to be made available to the entire industry.  Dedicated research within the project covers a range of crops (including wheat, barley, oilseed rape and sugar beet), while specific research themes include fungicide response, herbicide performance, long term tracking of yield responses, varietal interactions to inputs (including fungicides and fertiliser), spray application research and cultivation systems.  The work ranges from replicated small plot research through to large scale semi-field studies.  In addition knowledge transfer through the NAC programme acts as a conduit to other open research (e.g. other charitably funded research and research provided through levy bodies).  Knowledge transfer is delivered through a range of routes including the NIAB TAG Landmark Bulletin, the TAG website, a wide range of press articles and a series of dedicated summer open events. Please see the TAG website (www.thearablegroup.com and follow the links for TAG Research online) or call TAG on 01953 713200 or email tag@thearablegroup.com for further information. 

NFS; The New Farming Systems (NFS) study is a charitably funded initiative, undertaken by TAG at Morley in Norfolk, supported by The Morley Agricultural Foundation and The JC Mann Trust.  The NFS project is seeking routes to address energy usage and pollution risks in conventional rotation systems and to develop this research to find ways to maintain or increase financial margins whilst reducing the footprint of conventional farming.  As an agricultural community we are looking at a future in which energy will become increasingly expensive and our production focus will move further toward sustainable systems.  Current conventional farming practices tend to be energy reliant with a high hydrocarbon burden.  Field diesel or bagged fertiliser account for around 75% of the energy for every tonne of wheat produced.  Two of the main NFS themes being addressed in the large scale, long term replicated field studies are cultivations and fertility.   

• Cultivations across the rotation; this research strand is exploring approaches to shallow tillage across the rotation and seeking to identify situations where it can be used with confidence and ideally within quantified criteria (e.g. soil measurements).
• Fertility building in the rotation; this is being addressed through long term experiments considering both the use of cover crops and soil amendments. 

The future requirements of farming are going to be increasingly influenced by drivers such as energy, system costs (and returns) and pollution risks.  These drivers are not independent and long term systems studies are essential if we are to understand the interactions.