published on
Jim Orson interviewed by Paul Merchant, An Oral History of Farming, Land Management and Conservation in Post-War Britain, British Library, catalogue reference C1828/07/04. © British Library Board.
Transcript:
As I, as pesticides came along, I got frustrated about lack of information about how they should be used in cereals in particular, so I decided to do my own trials and I used to do six or seven trials a year, mainly on fungicides, some on seed rates, and I think I produced the first winter barley fungicide trial on winter barley in the country, I could claim that, and growth regulators when there were new ones as well, so I got heavily involved in trials work as well which I did in addition to my dut- nobody asked me to do it; I just decided to do it. And the farmers loved it. The farmers – we used to have, there’s a local discussion group called the Thorpe Discussion Group and I used to present the results at one of their meetings every winter and the room was always brim-full. Because nobody else was producing the data for them at that time and so, but it was really, I got interested when the triazoles first came on the market because they could control a whole width of, you know, broad spectrum disease control and that’s when it got really interesting; that was about 75, 76 really. So, I, I did a lot of work on my own hat on that and the farmers supported it by providing trail sites, harvested the trials, used their combines, which were a lot smaller – you could use as block combines then and so the farmers lapped it up really, they were really interested in, in adopting the new techn’ – as they always are – new technologies but they need to see the – farmers are very rational people, everyone seems to think they aren’t rational, you know, you want to persuade a farmer, give him the facts and he’ll do it, or not do it, based on the facts. Yeah, so, there you go.