E-learning courses designed to be undertaken at your own pace and to support your continuous professional development

The Nematicide Stewardship Programme (NSP) has set out industry guidelines, which are included in the Red Tractor protocol, to protect the consumer, operator and environment. In accordance with this, NSP and NIAB have developed this course to present the best practice guidelines for safe granular nematicide use. The NSP Protocol is now an audited part of the Red Tractor Standard for potatoes and sugar beet.

This entry level course provides a comprehensive guide to ensure safe and legal purchasing, storage and disposal of pesticides. It is packed with advice and provides useful links to relevant guidelines and further information making it an important resource for anyone working with plant protection products on farm.

2 BASIS points and 1 NRoSO point

The accurate identification and differentiation between fungal diseases and physiological leaf symptoms in barley are paramount to implementing successful disease control strategies.

This interactive quiz-based course will improve your identification skills of twelve barley diseases through the use of images, descriptions and diagnostic features, aiding you to make the correct treatment decisions in the field.

2 BASIS points and 1 NRoSO point

Despite current ex-farm prices, winter oilseed rape remains a valuable break crop in a combinable crop rotation. Careful attention to agronomy, especially disease management, will help to maximise profitability. Oilseed rape suffers from a number of yield-robbing diseases and accurate identification is the first step towards control.

This interactive quiz-based course, based on a series of images, descriptions and diagnostic features, will help you to identify and become more familiar with ten diseases of oilseed rape leading to improved crop management strategies.

2 BASIS points and 1 NRoSO point

Building arable rotations for soil fertility, yield and resilience course will equip you with the skills required to develop durable combinable crop rotations, including the impact of cultivations, crop choice and soil management on yield and gross margin return. Users are guided through the principles of rotational planning, based on results from NIAB TAG’s long-term rotational studies.

The course provides access to the interactive Rotations modelling tool. This robust web-based programme can be used for rotation planning, including demonstrating the average gross margin of a chosen system.

Detailed guidance enables the user to develop, plan and modify rotations that are both agronomically and economically resilient. By inputting your own gross margin costings the model can be used as a benchmarking tool against the NIAB standard, based on the impact on margins from long-term experimental trials from NIAB TAG and others.

Upon completion of this course users will understand:

• the impact of short and long rotations on crop species
• how cultivation techniques affect yield and margin
• how making rotation changes can impact the overall profitability of a farm
• how to use the Rotations modelling tool

2 BASIS points and 1 NRoSO point

Learn about fungicide management and gain access to the unique variety fungicide planning tool which allows users to see how individual varieties respond to fungicide inputs. Also included is a wheat disease database that covers identification, biology and control. This is an ideal follow-up to the principles learnt in our Wheat disease identification e-learning course. 

This course explains the science behind some of the remote sensing techniques that are used in modern farming. It explains satellite, air-borne and tractor-mounted sensors, what they actually measure and how to interpret the images. Understanding the science behind these technologies will allow you to use them more effectively on farm to help manage your inputs. The course covers a wide range of topics that explain how to use remote sensing in crop management, including:

• Introduction to the science behind remote sensing
• Interpreting colour and NDVI images in relation to crop growth stages and disease levels
• Spectral reflectance and mapping
• Thermal images and crops, including understanding photosynthesis and respiration
• The role of remote sensing in yield forecasting
• How to use weed maps to plan control strategies
• The science behind remote sensing: summary

This entry level course gives an overview of arable agriculture, showing the process of growing six common agricultural crops over the course of a year, as well as exploring related issues, such as soil, rotations and the supply chain from crop research and development through to purchase of the product by the consumer. Recommended web browsers are Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Beating the black-grass threat to yield and profit is a two module course designed to help you make rotational and agronomic changes to combat black-grass, whilst balancing profitability.  Upon completion of this course you will have an increased understanding of:

• The benefits and constraints of the control options for black-grass
•  How control strategies can be used together to improve overall control
• How rotational and agronomic changes can affect profitability on your farm

2 BASIS points and 1 NRoSO point for each module.

Maximising the benefits of cover crops in arable rotations is a three module course offering guidance to improve effectiveness of your cover cropping strategies. The course will provide advice on the skills required to deploy cover crops on-farm using the best agronomic strategies. Upon completion of the course you will be better equipped to:

• Understand how cover crops deliver benefits to soils, crop management and the environment
• Choose the right cover crop
• Improve the effectiveness of cover cropping strategies

At the end of this course participants will understand how to:

• Recognise common wheat diseases
• Identify some of the more unusual wheat diseases
• Distinguish between the symptoms of disease and physiological disorders