Tim Eyrich, a senior adviser with Agri-Trend, has a story about the Rothamsted Research centre in Hertfordshire, England.
He visited the longest running agricultural research station in the world, which was established in 1843, and saw “the vault,” where samples are stored.
“You can walk in there and every trial they did from 1850 to 2015, you will find a soil sample off that plot, a stalk sample off that plot and grain off that plot,” Eyrich told a group of agricultural advisers at a March 2 Lethbridge meeting.
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Rothamsted is often discussed at farm meetings because of its self-established goal of producing 360 bushels of wheat per acre on its farm within 20 years.
The centre takes its work seriously, said Eyrich, and its records are immaculate, if unusual because of time and wartime shortages.
“You walk in there (the vault) and you can go to the very back, and old containers of glass and clay from 1850 … and this is every experiment,” he said.
“What was amazing as you walked through there, you saw World War One … they were putting soil in tea containers, but they were disciplined. You can tell right when World War Two hit. There’s canteens full of grain, marked very nicely about what plot, what rep, what experiment came out of it.”
Eyrich said Rothamsted plans to achieve its wheat yield goal by “design, modelling and testing novel agricultural systems with enhanced sustainability while favouring high productivity with constrained availability of arable land.”
For more information, visit www.rothamsted.ac.uk.
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