The DEFRA-commissioned Corry Review landed earlier this week, and Environment Secretary Steve Reed has indicated DEFRA will implement a lot of it. (There was also a great section on Natural Capital 🌳 worth reading - Emily Norton posted a good summary)
In this post, I’ll explain:
• Why the current manure rules exist
• What’s not working (42% of farms inspected in 2023 were non compliant 👀 )
• What Dan Corry's Review suggests should change
This matters. If adopted, these recommendations could finally move us towards rules that are easier to follow and better for both farmers 🧑🌾 and rivers 🐟 .
🌊 So, why do manure rules exist?
Manure and fertiliser 💩 are packed with nutrients like nitrates and phosphates. If too much is applied or at the wrong time, crops can't take it all up, and it ends up in watercourses. The result: algae blooms, depleted oxygen, and dead fish — a process called eutrophication 💀 .
The Farming Rules for Water (FRfW) and Nitrate Vulnerable Zone (NVZ) regulations are supposed to reduce this type of pollution.
How they work:
• take soil samples to calculate crop need
• create 'spreading maps' to avoid high-risk areas (e.g. slopes, watercourses)
• closed periods to avoid spreading in winter when crops are dormant
💥 The problem: fixed dates, full stores, poor outcomes
Corry highlights what most farmers and advisors already know:
• Closed periods block early spreading, even when ground conditions are good
• This leads to slurry stores hitting capacity mid-winter
• Resulting in store failures or last-minute spreading in wet conditions, just to avoid stores overflowing — ironically increasing the pollution risk!
Corry calls this out clearly — and critices the complexity for farmers of the existing FRfW / NVZ rules.
💻 What does Corry suggest instead?
• Create one unified set of rules
• Look at amending fixed windows with a more risk-based approach
• Use better digital tools and leverage public datasets to support quick, real-time compliance
But here’s a slightly ominous sign: the review holds up a Nutrient Calculator scheme used in Poole Harbour as a model — the tool used there is a 15-tab Excel spreadsheet (you can see it here 🫣).
Farmers and agronomists who’ve used it say it’s time-consuming, clunky, and prone to copy/paste just to get it done. It's not the future.
🧑🌾 But what else can we do?
Well at Soil Benchmark, we're on a mission to show that modern tech can solve this problem. Our platform:
• Auto-generates field-level nutrient plans & risk maps
• Joins up SFI, NVZ and FRfW requirements
• Pre-populates from existing farm & national data
• Has, in 16 months, helped more than 3,500 farms covering 9% of English farmland
📌 Full report (pages 36–37)
