The industry-leading carbon measurement project with a pair of flux towers in fields of beet and cereals at Morley is well underway. In this update, BBRO’s Dr Georgina Barrett shares her observations from the first set of results and describes what’s happening – and ahead – in 2025.
Since my previous update on the flux tower research (February 2024) the first round of measurements have been concluded with the spring barley harvested. This means that there is now a full data set of what the carbon emissions are from a sugar beet field that goes into the spring barley. The full report is now available. The background to the work is already summarised. But here’s my topline summary of the findings so far.
A rye issue in 2023
In 2023 one of the sugar beet fields had a high level of ryegrass which, over the season, suppressed sugar beet growth and resulted in that field taking up less CO2 than the field with no ryegrass issues.
Overall, both sugar beet fields were small net sources of CO2 once the export of the sugar beet had been accounted for.
Carbon counting in crop after beet
In 2024, the following barley crop showed little difference in CO2 dynamics, when comparing the two fields, and both had similar yields suggesting no lasting impact of the difference in management strategy.
Next site for monitoring
The next chapter in the flux tower story started post-harvest in August 2024. The two systems were dismantled and transported 2.5 miles up the road to two more Morley Farm fields for the next cycle of beet and following spring cereal.
Despite the short distance, the journey seemed to take ages due to the stress of moving such sensitive, and high value, scientific equipment!
Thankfully the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and BBRO team did a great job and both towers were moved and reinstalled in just two days with only a few minor technical issues.
On with research without delay
As you may remember, delay in the equipment arriving in 2023 meant that the measurements did not start until the beet was drilled and the cover crop and stubble comparison between the two fields was missed.
This is not the case this time round, and the flux towers have been installed on one field which has been left as stubble and the other cover cropped. This will provide an interesting comparison of the carbon dynamics between the two.
Poised for interesting trial in 2025
Hopefully conditions will be good for drilling at the end of this month and the flux towers will again measure the carbon dynamics in the sugar beet crop. This will provide another year’s data and a useful comparison to the first sugar beet crop measured, as well as contributing to sugar beet data gathered as part of the wider flux tower network.
BBRO and CEH aim to publish this data so that it can be used to help inform and guide farming policy in the future, once we have some more sugar beet data gathered this year.