Regenerative agriculture and a new car
My new car arrived today. The last one I bought was 2008, so it’s not something that happens very often. The biggest worry is keeping it clean while driving all over the Cotswolds doing habitat management over the winter.
Its first major outing was to go with a few friends to a talk by Wotton CAN about regenerative agriculture. This was a fantastic evening with talks by two farmers about the realities of practising regenerative agriculture on their farms.
First up was Simon and Kat who are tenant farmers on an 80 acre site in Berkeley Heath. They both come from traditional farming backgrounds but both decided they wanted to operate their farm on different principles. Their main principles are no dig, mob grazing and grass finished animals. They don’t quite have enough land to allow parts of grassland to completely go to seed – they need a 90 day rotation window for that and they currently manage about 60.
There is also a market garden polytunnel and they keep hens.
They sell direct to the public through a self service farm shop which they only have to stock in the morning and check in the evening, so is very efficient on their time. It’s certainly something I will go down and check out – I’ve not seen a system like this before and it’s a very innovative investment.
The second talk was Jake from Overbury Farm up in Bredon Hill. This is a huge 1600ha farm which is arable, sheep and 12% under high tier stewardship. Soil management is the heart of everything, and they make extensive use of cover crops, grazing rotation and direct drilling of crops.
It’s truly large scale and the numbers were impressive. The cost per hectare today of putting nitrogen back into the soil was about one quarter of the cost when they were using fertilizer and ploughs back in 2009. The main principle is to keep the soil covered at all times, either with the main crop or a cover crop.
This feels like the future of farming, and a student from the Royal Ag who was attending the talk confirmed this was indeed being taught to the current crop of students. However, the reality is that they won’t actually inherit control of their farms and decisions until far into the future. So there’s a great deal of resistance from the existing traditional farmers who have always done it their way.
One interesting side comment from Jake concerned Biodiversity Net Gain where a 30 year commitment is required. He believes that the the price of carbon capture units is going to increase dramatically over the next decade, so locking in land commitments now for that length of time is not economically worthwhile.
All in all, an excellent evening. I made contact with a couple of organisers from Wotton CAN and managed to get there and back without crashing my new car.
