Innovation sites: A fresh take on Monitor Farms

Innovation sites are popping up across the UK. Bek Hirstman explains how they fit into our refreshed Monitor Farm network.

Our Farm Excellence activities promote change that improves farming businesses.

It includes taking research and turning it into practical actions, but does this apply to Monitor Farms? 

The Monitor Farm programme was rolled out across the UK in 2014.

It brought farmers together to share business performance and best-practice information.

Since then, Monitor Farms have evolved beyond hosting informative events.

For example, we’ve seen an increase in on-farm tests to ground-truth new ways of working.

A decade on, it was clear that the original aim of the programme had shifted.

There is now a greater focus on testing and seeing innovation, rather than just hearing about it.

This year, following one of our regular reviews, it became clear that the programme needed a strategic overhaul.

We had to redefine what it means to be a monitor farmer in an environment with rapidly shifting commercial pressures and burgeoning opportunities and challenges.

With a strong need for flexibility and collaboration, we’ve replaced the old model with a new Monitor Farm network.

It should appeal to more farmers because there are fewer rules, including how long a farm needs to be in the network.

We want to nurture farmers’ ideas and develop plans suited to their specific business needs, topic interests and time constraints.

The network will support farmers who want to test new approaches on a small scale to find solutions to farming challenges.

Where a Monitor Farm runs an on-farm test, try-out or demonstration, we’ll refer to these as innovation sites.

As always, all activities will be farmer-led, but they may be inspired by the topics and themes posted by farmers in our research ideas letterbox or key questions raised by research.

Our South Notts Monitor Farm joined the network this year and hosts one of the first innovation sites.

Sarah and Grant Page’s farm covers 1,000 acres of Crown Estate tenanted land and 100 acres of flexible grazing.

They are no strangers to cover crops, but they want to make their covers work harder for multiple purposes, including for their crops and livestock.

On 24 August 2026, following rainfall, they established a brassica-heavy, cover-crop grazing mix, which includes turnip rape, stubble turnips, kale, forage rape and tillage radish, as well as berseem clover. The crop started to emerge about a week later.

We’ve set up tramline treatments in the field to assess the impact of sheep grazing during late autumn and winter.

The central tramlines will be grazed.

The outer strips will not be grazed and include a no-cover-crop control.

Each treatment will be repeated twice across the field.

A key assessment is nutrient availability, which we’ll quantify in conventional ways.

We’ll also test our new decision support tree that accounts for nutrients released from cover crops, which will be published later this year.

Finally, we’ll overlay two nitrogen treatments in the following spring cash crop.

These will compare the farm standard rate with a reduced rate, based on the nutrient assessment results.

Ultimately, this innovation site will provide data on the potential to reduce spring nitrogen applications in following cash crops.

Monitor Farms repeatedly show that the most valued way to promote best practice and new ideas is to meet on farms to share and discuss results.

It’s why on-farm meetings will remain a staple part of the Monitor Farm network.

The meetings often take place during the less hectic periods in the winter and summer.

Topics at other innovation sites include nutrient management, soil health and integrated pest management (IPM).

The latter includes tests of our new BYDV tool in wheat and barley and stacking options to manage cabbage stem flea beetle in oilseed rape.

Our Knowledge Exchange Managers remain at the heart of the network and work with levy-paying farms across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Our team will support farmers in the network every step of the way, by taking ideas and designing approaches that fit with commercial operations.