Watch our webinar: Rest, recovery and rooting depth

Allowing plants ample time to rest, recover and develop deep roots is a core principle of regenerative farming. 

In our Rest, recovery and rooting depth webinar Dr Allen Williams, from our mentoring partner Understanding Ag, explains that while plants benefit from being given time to recover physically and physiologically from grazing, they also need periods of rest. These periods of rest will have a number of other positive effects, such as recharging the soil microbial population, encouraging biodiversity and building additional root biomass and depth. 

Dr Allen Williams from Understanding Ag

Allen also discusses the importance of taking a disruptive approach to adaptive grazing and the huge positive effects this can have on rooting depth and soil health. 

“A large percentage of our organic matter increase will come from the root biomass and rooting depth,” says Allen. 

“If we want to build more organic matter we’ve got to put roots deeper into the ground and we’ve got to put more total root biomass into the soil. This also helps us to optimise our soil microbial habitat, which is crucial to microbes feeding back nutrients to those plants and for them having a higher nutrient density.”

The webinar also hears from two beef, sheep and arable farmers from Hexham - Ali Wardle and Shaun Maw - who have been applying some of the principles on their farms.

You can watch the full webinar here:

Our next webinar Confused about Carbon? will take place on August 23 from 7pm to 8.15pm. Please follow this link to register and for more details.