Background

The Focus On Farming Practice (FOFP) project has developed into one of the leading integrated farm management projects in the country, and the only one to include grassland in the system. With nine years of results already analysed, the FOFP project offered a unique comparison of farming systems in difficult times, to aid future decisions from both an economic and environmental viewpoint.

The FOFP project was born in 1993 and set out to evaluate Integrated Farm Management (IFM) in a long term study involving the whole crop rotation, against conventional farming systems, to explore ways of using inputs more efficiently and experiment with cultivation techniques in order to improve profitability. Uniquely this experiment included grass leys in the rotation to reflect mixed farming as well as all arable systems. The project was concluded in 2002.

A 150 acre (60ha) site was chosen on farmcare's 5000 acre Stoughton Estate near Leicester. The fields were split into seven pairs of c.10 acre (4ha) plots, with one side of each pair being farmed conventionally by the estate farm manager and the other side managed by the project manager using IFM techniques.

The use of the site at Stoughton also allowed comparisons to be made with the organic farm on the estate, which was established in 1989 with both stockless and mixed organic systems and was expanded up to 600 acres in 1997.