It was actually 2022,
beginning of 2022,
and it was a very,
it was a pretty warm spring,
very warm actually.
And the crop was actually growing away in February,
March,
and the sheep were on here on this 30 hectare field.
The crop was probably maybe eight inches tall,
a winter cereal.
And we allowed them to graze it down to maybe two to three inches.
And we did a,
you know,
we were quite strict.
if they had some...
fairly tight areas to graze and they were moved fairly regularly across the field anyway they came off the field and within within a week or two the crop um you know the last areas that they'd been on had totally recovered and was growing away and you
know if you went on if you looked at that field two or three weeks after they'd left it you you wouldn't see any it just looked like a normal week ungrazed wheat crop but that crop um that field then yielded at harvest two tonnes a hectare more than any of the other
winter wheat fields on the farm not noticeably different crop soil types had the same treatment otherwise but it just had grazing in the winter um early spring and it and it was incredible hi
james welcome to the deep seed podcast thank you very much thank you for having me
And thank you for hosting me for the last couple of days here in your beautiful,
wonderful farm.
Pleasure,
Raphael.
Pleasure.
Maybe to get started,
you could introduce yourself for the listeners and tell us a little bit about your personal journey.
Sure.
My name's James Busher.
I'm 50 years old.
I was born close to the farm here in Suffolk and grew up here.
actually I
In my 20s,
my father never pressured me into coming back to the farm,
so I decided to get away.
I went and lived in Sydney,
Australia for a year,
worked in finance,
and then came back to the UK and worked in London for a hedge fund for about eight years or so.
I learned how to trade futures and options,
quite niche work,
lots of staring at screens and all this sort of stuff.
Came to a point in around 2001,
2002,
when I just,
I got fed up with London life and,
well,
urban life,
really.
And
I spoke to my boss and I said,
look,
I can't work in the city anymore.
He said,
fine,
take your computer and go and work in a rural setting.
And I ended up moving to North Norfolk on the,
a couple of hours from London on the coast.
And I was living with a friend of mine who farms up there.
But I was trading with a friend of my boss's local to that,
to his,
to my friend's place.
And
I managed that for a few months.
But then I realized that actually it wasn't just London.
It was staring at computer screens that was doing my head in.
And we had this wonderful opportunity to work on the land.
My dad was mid-60s.
I was seeing what my friend was up to daily on the farm,
on his farm.
So
I quit and I came back and joined.
My father here at Nettishall in 2003 and so very different no real training prior to coming back to the farm in the agricultural world and yeah just learned from the guys that we employed at the time and also from my father and
yeah we just ran so a bit of a background to the farm that's my personal sort of journey up to when I came back but with regards to the farm my father came here from Scotland.
He was brought up in Edinburgh.
came back down down to norfolk he used to work with his uncle who farms in mid-norfolk so quite close to here and he went to agricultural college and then he he had an opportunity to take on the tenancy of hall farm where we are now and it was a big dairy farm um grass and
he he started doing that and he he ran that for about 20 odd years a dairy dairy business and he grew the herd to about 500 animals so quite a big herd at the time and um
Actually,
I think it was the bank manager or either the bank manager or the accountant that came to him and said,
look,
you're working around the clock.
You're not really earning any money.
Get rid of those black and white things and sell the milk quota.
And he took that on board.
The work-life balance wasn't there,
basically.
And he so in I think it was 1986,
he sold the all the cows and the milk quota.
And then we became quite a traditional Breckland farm.
This is the area here,
the Brecks.
and by that I mean we we
Ploughed up the grassland,
we became an arable business,
but we're on light sandy soils here,
so actually quite good for growing vegetables and stuff.
So we got an abstraction license from the Environment Agency to pull water from underground aquifers to water crops,
and we rented out some of the land here for vegetables,
so for potatoes,
carrots,
parsnips,
even onions were here,
on and off.
And then...
We,
for ourselves,
we used to grow winter and spring cereals in sugar beet.
And so we had quite a diverse rotation.
But that system,
you know,
it's quite an extractive sort of system.
There's a lot of tillage involved,
a lot of water applied to the vegetable crops.
And we were just seeing quite significant soil degradation over the years.
And actually,
from when I came back to 2018,
we were seeing,
you know,
Actually,
quite significant yield loss in our cereal crops.
The soils were pretty dead.
You know,
we were seeing compacted soils,
waterlogged soils,
anaerobic soils generally.
And at that point,
we kind of felt like we needed to change something.
Was there a particular point or a particular moment where you really felt like,
okay,
you needed to change?
Or was it a gradual process?
I would say 2018 was kind of the year,
my epiphanal year,
I call it.
I mean,
I was having,
personally,
we were having,
I was having some troubles maritally,
and thankfully we kind of got through that.
But that was a difficult time in that regard.
I also had a really bad accident on the farm,
which knocked me for six.
I very nearly died.
And...
you know,
I've still got,
I'm still feeling the effects of it now with,
with hearing loss in one ear and tinnitus and stuff.
So
I came through that and I,
I,
a few months after that,
I saw the surgeon that operated on me and he sat me down and he said,
look,
if you,
if the bleed in your brain had been any worse,
um,
you,
you wouldn't be here.
And it was kind of,
it was a very emotional time for me.
That was like a,
yeah,
I totally broke down and I,
um,
yeah,
I just kind And so there was that huge...
news and that huge event that happened and also on a lesser level on the but still significant on the land we were seeing you know we weren't i was i was walking across our lawn um in the winter evenings at that time and seeing lots
of worms shooting back as you shone light over the grass you know pretty much an organic lawn effectively and then as soon as we got into our arable fields there was no life no worms and um
So yeah,
that and what had happened personally,
men,
I just felt like we needed to do something different.
And so we initially in 2018,
we just started with growing some cover crops.
So we were growing quite a few spring crops with the vegetables and the sugar beet.
So we had opportunities to grow covers over the winter.
So not leaving any bare soil.
And then so we grew covers and we introduced livestock in the form of my neighbor's sheep.
flying flock i think they call it these days so richard and katie used to bring um sheep onto graves and so we sort of started that journey um into sort of regenerating soils in 2018 but um the
yeah we we ran that for a couple of years but we we were still renting land to the vegetable guys we were still growing sugar beet and those those crops in particular are quite heavy on the tillage um for lots of reasons um and that.
and also on the inputs,
the chemical inputs.
And so
I didn't feel like we were doing enough,
like we were kind of making a small effort in improving soils,
but there was a small effort.
And then there was kind of almost a backstep when the big kit arrived and,
you know,
the plows and the destoners and everything else.
So
I think in 2020 it was.
And during this time,
from 2018 to 2020,
I was listening to quite a few.
podcast reading a lot of books about um the soil health and what can be done and i listened to a john kemp's podcast in late 2020 um one of his episodes featured an english guy called ben taylor davis regen ben he's known known as and um what
he talked about kind of really resonated with me and um i looked him up basically and we we we got talking and he came and visited the farm
And I said,
look,
you know,
we're not doing enough.
I want to implement change fast.
I'm not,
you know,
as I learned from my accident,
you know,
you can,
we're not here for long and it can.
And so I wanted to really crack on.
So I just said,
look,
I want to stop doing this and doing that.
And he's been sort of holding our hands through that process since.
So that was what,
four or five years ago after?
Four years ago.
Four years ago,
yes.
We actually met,
you and I,
at Groundswell.
Not this year,
the year before,
right?
At the bar,
just queuing for a beer.
Yes,
absolutely.
Yes.
And
I remember one of the first things
I told you is that a lot of the farmers I had met told me that it's really important to just go slowly,
step by step into the sort of regenerative transition.
And you told me,
well,
I did exactly the opposite.
I went all in as quickly as I could.
Yeah.
My friends would say I'm not the most patient of people.
um
And actually,
just from the stuff I was reading,
I mean,
books like The Silent Spring,
you know,
I suddenly realized that actually insecticides are just horrific products.
They're very cheap and they're widely used in conventional agriculture.
And I just thought,
we don't need that.
We can farm without those.
And I didn't like,
you know,
I've always been interested in wildlife and conservation.
And so we've always been doing stewardship-y sort of stuff.
but it's felt like parts of the land will have a...
a pollinator net to strip around a field or a field corner that we leave um uh sort of for nature as it were but then we're still farming in an aggressive um heavy input style in the middle of the field so it's sort of a them and us kind of thing i didn't feel so i wanted to sort
of farm with nature a bit more um and you know i i as well when i met you i was 48 i guess
And
I just felt like we knew,
you know,
I just wanted to implement change fast.
So insecticides went.
We decided we didn't want to use fungicides anymore.
We didn't want to use seed treatments.
And we wanted to stop using plant growth regulators.
And as well as that,
we wanted to cut back on our synthetic fertilized use.
And that's,
you know,
it's a big,
it's a lot to do straight away.
And there has been,
you know,
there's been yield losses.
It's not a...
a step to be underestimated but i for me i needed someone to hold my hand and actually you know i just don't think there are enough advisors to help us go this go down this route because it's change at scale is doing anything different i mean particularly
to your neighbors or particularly um nationally is is a is is
a big step and it's a brave step um but i i haven't looked back amazing yeah you know that's actually something that a lot of my guests have said both farmers and experts is that we we really need independent agronomists agroecologists funded
by the state ideally or partially at least yeah to help farmers how how helpful would that be for farmers like yourselves who who want to change the way they farm oh just enormous enormous i mean Thank you.
Unfortunately,
you know,
there's not many Ben's around and
I mean there are a few other guys in the UK that can help
But you know,
he's getting more and more
Queries basically everyone's really struggling in the conventional but in farming in general,
but some you know inputs are going getting more expensive
Margins are getting squeezed quantity prices are low.
You know,
there's this it's tough out there and
I've had I've had growers come here
to farm walks and stuff and they're you know they're working with big ag businesses who are providing an agronomist to them they're buying the chemicals from them fertilizer um and they're miserable um but they don't feel they can kind
of do without it um because they don't know this the unknown it's the yeah it's it's the worry that if you don't use um let's say a fungicide the crop's going to
basically die it's going to be a total disaster but and that's how we felt a few years ago i mean we felt when we first started thinking about cutting back on fungicide use so probably 2019 um you know we were getting advice from our agronomist to apply
let's say a t3 or t2 um to mitigate possible rust um infection or whatever it might be in a cereal crop and you know i'd say to guys,
right,
okay,
well let's just...
you know he'd send me the wreck and we'd we'd we'd just miss out a section of the field we would just wouldn't spray a couple of tram lines in the field and we'd feel like like naughty school kids doing it it was it was and actually what what what the effect of that was when we did it is when we ran the combine through the crop the
There would seem to be a minor,
a tiny yield loss where we hadn't used that T2 spray.
But actually the cost of the chemical plus the pass with the sprayer would have,
against the cost of the price of the commodity,
we would have lost a little bit of money for going through the crop with that T2 spray.
So,
I mean,
it was negligible,
but we didn't lose a crop.
We lost a tiny amount of yield.
It kind of then led us down the route of actually going away from monocrops and companion cropping and all the other stuff that I'm sure we'll talk about today.
Yeah,
so two different things I'm hearing here is one of the big reasons why farmers are struggling to change the way they farm and transition is that they are lacking the technical knowledge or the access to knowledge on these new generative
farming and science and all of that.
And the other reason is risk.
That's actually something that a lot of the experts we've just spoken to in the last few days,
they've pretty much all said is one of the key reasons why farmers don't kind of go towards regenerative.
But we were talking yesterday at the dinner table,
and you said something really interesting that stuck with me.
You were talking about all of these other farmers,
you know,
in the area and all of the struggles they're having right now,
and how they're really struggling to make ends meet,
because the yields are buff
falling down because one year is too dry,
one year is too wet,
because,
you know,
the price of commodity crops is too low,
all of these reasons.
And so you told me,
I'm not sure the exact quote,
but everyone's asking me how I can deal with so much risk,
but actually,
who's taking the biggest risk here?
Yeah,
right.
Yeah,
absolutely.
Right.
So you're,
well,
we'll come on to that in a second.
But just for the first part,
you were talking about independent agronomy.
If we could just go back.
Of course.
I think
I was on a panel at Groundswell this year,
and we were talking about agronomists and how this works.
But in the UK,
a lot of the agronomists are working for big ag firms,
ag chem firms.
And,
you know,
they're sort of incentivized to sell you chemicals that you may or may not need on the farm.
And the general view was what needs to happen is that agronomists need to be,
you know,
they're professionals.
They understand pests and diseases.
But we need,
as farmers,
we need to pay them.
rather than sort of free advice and and then we use the chemicals they're selling us um and they're getting a bit of an income from from that side of things we need to pay them us farmers need to pay these agronomists um probably more money for their professional advice so they can maintain
an income but also we then look at other ways of of of going forward without reaching for a can and you
don't you know unfortunately these these ag chem firms make you know huge amounts of money from from selling chemicals to farmers and
And so that's gonna be a big hit for them I don't I I don't really know the way forward with that But
I you know I think that you can
I would like to think that we could we could pull out
Pull off some independent and get some decent independent advice from them for a fee
Without having to reach for a can but that's that's that's absolutely
But going back to the second point,
with the conventional growers and risk,
we were talking about a situation,
you know,
when the Ukraine war started with a massive spike in fertilizer prices.
I was talking to farmers after that season,
after that growing season,
and some of them were saying that these conventional guys,
big farms down in Essex,
they're spending,
at the time they were spending between £1,500 and £2,000 a hectare on costs,
fixed and variable costs.
on growing a wheat crop,
let's say.
And,
you know,
at the time when,
so a few months after the war broke out,
I think as prices sort of settled down again,
commodity prices settled down,
there came a point when wheat was worth between 200 and 250 pounds a ton.
Their growing costs were,
you know,
between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds a ton.
So they need to hit yields of eight,
nine tons a hectare just to break even.
We,
on our farm,
we're trying to keep costs below
600 pounds a hectare.
So,
you know,
I need to yield three tons a hectare to break even.
Now,
and then I,
and so exactly as I said to you the other day,
I mean,
who's taking the risk here?
We're,
you know,
the pressure on them to get those yields when the biggest factor is really is drought and,
you know,
is weather conditions through the spring,
through the growing season.
I feel like we're the ones,
you know.
being far more sensible and taking way less risk.
Yeah.
Okay.
And for people like me who have kind of no idea about these things,
is no eight,
nine,
10 tons per,
per hectare.
Is that a lot?
What's the sort of,
so.
Not for us here on our soils,
but down in,
well,
funnily enough,
again,
ongoing chats with my friends down on sort of Essex clay,
so much stronger land.
In years gone by,
they have been able to achieve 10 tonnes a hectare.
But in the last few years,
they're just not able to do that.
So some of these guys now,
they're looking at seven and a half,
maybe eight max.
So they've,
and they'll freely admit,
they've just overworked the soils.
Okay.
You know,
a fairly limited rotation of maybe oilseed rape and wheat,
too much tillage,
too much reliance on inputs,
and they're ending up with quite dead soils,
and they are massively concerned about the situations down there now.
I bet.
Yeah,
so okay,
so basically 10 tons is like the best you can expect in a good year.
Yeah.
And this is getting harder and harder to achieve anyway with the state of the soil and with climate change and all of that.
Yeah.
And therefore,
if a farmer just to break even needs to achieve that,
that's a big ask.
It's a big ask and it's a huge risk because the best case scenario is going to break even and in most cases actually lose money.
Yeah,
exactly.
And that's why,
you know,
subsidies have been phased out.
I think they began phasing out,
you know,
they began being phased out a few years ago in the UK as sort of single arable area payment.
And now they're totally gone.
And that was,
you know,
for many years,
that was kind of the profit really of a farming business.
And now that's gone.
So I'm mega concerned about the future for a lot of growers,
but especially the conventional ones.
I mean,
I suppose in some ways it might strong arm them into change.
So perhaps that's a good thing.
For sure.
Would you recommend any farmers sort of starts looking towards regenerative farming or is that depending on the context?
uh i would absolutely recommend every farmer to do so but it's just you know it's a big step and and not only you need everyone on the same page so in a farming business i mean we were when we began change we had two guys working for us who who were young and they're they
had worked on conventional farms before but they they were interested in what we were looking to do they come to groundswell with me they they
learn from ben when he comes to the farm we're all kind of in it together and now we're all we're all driven towards the same goal of kind of building reasonable yields and improving soil health and so on um but um you know family wise my father he's been farming you know the same way for a lot of years and and it's been you
know as as stipulated by the government they wanted you know food security and so on and farming every acre um filling in ditches and so on that was
the way it was for a lot of years.
And so it's been quite hard for him to accept the change we're making,
accepting maybe a few weeds growing in the field or just looking at things a bit differently.
But he's come around to it now,
and I think he's really proud of what we've achieved.
But yeah,
it's hard.
You need everyone pulling in the same direction.
You can't have any anchors or brakes on.
And I guess whether it's a relative or whether it's...
farm employees who have been used to farming conventionally for a lot of years they're almost
I don't mean willing it to fail but when you make changes that you know they're used to conventional growing and conventional whatever the doing jobs at certain times of the year that they've always done and it's just and it's kind of resistance to change of course and no one likes to be told that what you're doing is wrong yeah and so they don't want you to prove them wrong I mean,
it's normal.
yeah and actually for us with with going back to the agronomist the guy we were using he's a good guy and i you know he helped us a lot over the years but when we took ben on ben just said look you can't have um we wanted to keep the chemical agronomist on because i kind of wanted to let him down let him down gently but i wanted to possibly
still receive some chemical advice some herbicide advice for weed control because that was still something that we were doing a little bit of but actually ben said um look i can give you that so Thank you.
Let's move on from the previous guy.
And actually...
The guy that we had,
the chemical agronomist,
you know,
he would come on farm and he'd have a wander around and,
you know,
we'd have a chat in the kitchen afterwards over a coffee and he'd say,
you know,
that weed might be a problem.
But he'd also say,
you know,
he's hearing about,
let's say,
rust infestations in wheat in the area and blah,
So you end up with a bit of doubt about what you're doing,
which wasn't helping.
You know,
you just need to be positive.
We'd made a decision.
We weren't going to use certain pesticides.
And
I wasn't about to back down.
But you just need to be.
positive about that and you can't have any negative,
any doubts in your head from anyone.
I really hope you're enjoying this conversation so far.
I just need to take a few seconds of your time to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast,
Soil Capital.
Soil Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils.
They're a fantastic company.
I love what they're doing and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast.
If you'd like to learn more about them,
I will leave a link in the description of this episode.
Let's get back to the conversation.
I'd love to talk in more detail about your current farming system,
because you told us about what you were farming before for a number of years.
Then your sort of transition process.
So yeah,
it'd be great if you could explain now,
what are you farming?
How does your system work?
How does your rotation work?
Don't hesitate to give us as much info and detail as possible so we can get the full picture.
Sure,
sure.
So,
you know,
prior to 2018,
we had a pretty diverse rotation with veggies and,
you know,
so we were,
you know,
we were pretty,
we had a nice wide rotation.
But actually,
when we got,
when we said,
when we gave the vegetable guys notice and also...
the sugar beet we decided to come out of sugar beet we were then left with um wheat barley oats that we were growing ourselves and we wanted to bring in some additional crops obviously um so we then looked at um well in fact we started growing beans we started growing
peas we started growing oilseed rape and we also started looking at some quite niche crops like chia we tried borage we We tried aji flower.
I mean,
some quite...
very niche little crops growing growing those for a guy in uh essex and they were used in health care um well uh cheer uh sorry cheer and uh aji flower are kind of superfoods and um borages
used in health care for for creams and stuff but anyway we they were interesting crops and it kept a fairly broad rotation but um
We kind of learned that actually some of those crops weren't good.
They were quite challenging to grow,
chia especially,
borage also on our soils.
So we then decided actually they needed to come out.
So for the last two,
three years,
we've been just growing rape,
winter wheat,
spring wheat,
a bit of spring barley occasionally,
some oats,
some beans and peas.
So still a fairly robust mix.
And they're all...
crops that we could harvest in the summer what we didn't want to be doing was harvesting crops in the autumn where conditions might be wet and we make a mess so it was all we were looking to plant stuff that we could harvest in basically in august and
july when soils were at their driest we could go in and out take the crop off and then get a cover crop straight in behind and what we were looking to try and do was grow maybe 50 autumn sown crops and 50 spring
So enabling us to grow a lot of covers.
And yeah,
and that's what we've been doing.
And I guess initially for the first year or so,
we were looking to just grow sort of monocrops of those.
we quickly realized that wasn't really helpful when we'd taken the decision to not use fungicides and insecticides.
So we then,
from 2022-23,
we started looking at companions.
So since then,
we grow a legume with a cereal or a cereal with a legume together.
When you say companions,
it means you grow them together on the same field.
yeah so initially we grew oats with beans we'd grow oats being kind of the main crop so we'd plant the the oats at around 200 kilos a hectare and the beans at about 40 but what we found with that the first year we did that we we did a bit of a trial we had a an oat and bean field we had a monocrop oat field very close by
we were going to grow them in the same way uh no fungicides no insecticides or pgrs but um and unlimited amounts of nitrogen but just see um what what came of it and that year we had a pretty wet spring
quite humid as well i mean perfect disease conditions um and i went into the oat and bean crop in early may i think it was and it was looking absolutely wonderful beautiful green
Very,
very healthy.
And then I walked 500 yards down the farm track to the monocrop oat crop.
And it was decimated by rust.
I mean,
it yielded very poorly.
It looked very sick.
And about two days later,
I had a school tour come around.
And they were all ag students,
17-year-old guys doing a BTEC in agriculture.
Some of them based...
on very conventional farms.
And it was great.
It was wonderful timing.
I took them around.
We looked at those two on it and they just were flabbergasted by it.
So it really proved to me that companions are extremely effective at...
mitigating pest and disease pressures and actually from that that so that was kind of our trial year from then we started for the last couple of years we've been companioning everything um so we grow we grow wheat with um clover
or vetch um sometimes peas we did a pea collaboration with a local business recently or beans um so we try a mix of things um so most of the time it's a grain and a I give them together.
Yeah,
most of the time it's a grain and legume,
so you're getting the benefit,
the nitrogen fixing ability of the legume that they're pulling the nitrogen from the atmosphere,
releasing it via their roots into the soil for the cereal crop to benefit from and also the following crop to benefit.
I've heard varying suggestions as to what the amount of nitrogen is that they leave in the soil.
around 100,
it seems to be around 100,
maybe a tiny bit more,
100 kilos of nitrogen,
residual nitrogen left in the soil after a legume crop.
Free nitrogen.
I mean,
it's incredible.
So,
so that,
yeah,
that's been a real,
I don't know,
we grow oilseed rape with vetch and clover.
We grow triticale or rye with vetch.
We grow peas with triticale.
We know.
just whatever,
but it seems to work.
And,
you know,
there's a cost with some of the companions for separation at the end,
but that's a fraction of what we'd be spending on inputs to control pest and diseases.
So just technically speaking,
just to get to the bottom of this.
So first of all,
when you plant those mixed companion crops,
do you just have a mix of the two seeds in your machine?
Then you just plant them together at the same time with the same machine?
Yeah.
So we've got a disc drill,
a sort of direct disc drill,
so we can plant straight into a cover crop with this.
It's got two hoppers in it,
on the back of it,
two seed hoppers.
So we'll fill one with the cereal and the other one with the legume,
calibrate the two systems accordingly,
and then they both run down the same seed pipes and are drilled together.
So we don't have,
with our system,
we don't have a row of...
wheat and then a row of um vetch let's say um within that single drill row we've got vetch and wheat okay yeah in this case you said something like 200 what was it 200 kilos of of the grain and then like 40 50 of the so so what the machine will just automatically then plant one two three grains one legume one two three exactly kind of like that yeah yeah
randomly yeah randomly randomly but kind of the ratio i mean i think there are drills now that in fact i know there were drills now that can plant um a row of wheat and then a row of beans and then a row of wheat and a row of beans or whatever but i don't know whether there's any benefit to doing that um maybe if you want to then take out the companion
later in the season after it perhaps it's done the bulk of its good work so maybe you could run through with a hoe let's say an inter-row hoe that would take out the
companion crop if you then didn't want the separation cost at the end of it but for us you know these these companions like the veg or the bean or whatever they're still they're valuable for us so we will separate ideally on farm or elsewhere and then take back the the
companion seed and use it again so yeah so once once it's grown uh the both crops are ready to harvest at the same time right yeah so i guess you
pick crops that grow at the same speed yeah a lot of people have asked me what do they mature together that's a big like puts the skids on a lot of people from because they're worried about um whatever ripening a lot or maturing a lot earlier than the other crop but growing
up together they seem to just mature together and we just we've never had a problem they yeah we've they all seem to be both fit and ready to go we harvest them together and so you then end up with a grain store full of vegetables
a mix.
And as long as you grow species that are easily separable,
you know,
very different sized plants.
Different sizes of seeds and grains.
So the machine can easily kind of recognise the two sizes.
Yeah.
I mean,
it costs around,
for us,
about £20 a tonne to separate.
So you separate them on the farm?
You have a machine for that?
Or do you hire someone outside to do that?
a bit of both
We've got a machine on farm that's a little bit basic,
but it has the ability to separate to some degree.
But actually,
generally,
to do it properly for us,
we haven't got the resources to spend somewhere in the region,
between probably £50,000 to £100,000 on a...
you know state-of-the-art seed separation system so we send them locally to a seed merchant he'll do it for us okay yeah um and and if we look a bit deeper into the finance of it all since you you know you have a background in finance i'm yeah i'm assuming that that you have some numbers maybe you could share um if
we compare you know just a a wheat field in a field where you have this combination of different crops uh the different associated costs and benefits how does it compare
So the way we're farming now,
we're trying,
as I said,
to keep the cost below £600 a hectare all in.
And,
you know,
we've removed...
So we rely on quite a lot of organic manure that we apply,
which is a lot cheaper than synthetic fertiliser.
We've reduced our synthetic fertiliser input costs by about at least a half.
we don't have the insecticide,
the fungicide,
the PGR costs.
We try and home save almost always our seed,
which is a lot cheaper than purchased seed from a seed merchant.
And yield-wise,
is that what you were...
No,
everything.
So
I guess you have extra expenses here in the case of manure,
for example.
Yeah.
the seed separation,
maybe the seeds themselves are more expensive for the legumes that they are.
So there are extra costs and there's a whole range of benefits.
And I'm kind of hoping you can give us a kind of a nice picture of how this compares.
Yeah,
I mean,
because we will all,
you know,
by and large,
we will home save our seeds.
So for growing stuff,
we'll have it separated.
We'll take back,
you know,
one part of that and use it again the following year.
you
I mean,
our seed costs,
I think,
I may be wrong here,
but if you were to buy a ton of seed,
a ton of wheat from a local merchant,
you'd probably be looking for a modern-ish variety,
maybe six or seven hundred pounds a ton for a bag of seed.
I mean,
the most we can achieve with some of the businesses who we're selling to for a price of a ton of wheat would be around 300 with wild farms.
We'll come on to that probably.
But otherwise,
you know,
commodity wheat price at the moment is around 200,
even less,
160 pounds a ton,
I think.
So,
you know,
if we home save,
we're immediately at a big advantage to those buying treated seed often from a seed merchant.
I think our yields going on to that,
we probably,
you know,
our best yields at the moment are probably around six tons.
And when you've taken out the legume element,
let's say in a cereal crop,
we're looking at around five tons of.
cereal and a ton of legume um so um yeah margin wise we're we're significantly better off than a conventional grower we've still got five tons of clean seed um and
and we've got and we've got the legume component to keep to either sell or to keep for for future use um and then you also reduce your costs in in fertilizers it's free nitrogen
Yeah,
so we're getting a big kick,
a big leg up with the free nitrogen.
I mean,
I think,
so the first year we reduced the nitrogen from,
I mean,
a conventional grower growing a milling wheat will use around 240 kilos of nitrogen.
We're growing milling wheat with about 90 kilos of nitrogen,
80,
90 of synthetic nitrogen.
And there's opportunity to probably reduce that further.
But,
you know,
it's sort of...
It baffles me when I talk to farmers like you,
and I've spoken to quite a few farmers over the last couple of years.
Farming in general and food production has been optimized to produce as much as possible for the lowest possible cost.
But yet,
I see that using certain methods of regenerative farming and here just companion planting,
separating seeds,
you can already save a lot on your costs and improve your revenue.
So
I'm...
wondering sometimes why we're not seeing more farmers do that it seems like you know yeah i i'm with you it's just it's coming off that chemical sort of bandwagon or whatever you want to call it i it's hard to take that step off you've got a lot of you
know a lot of farmers have a lot of conventional growers have got a guy selling them fertilizer a guy selling them chemicals whatever it might be they sit in the kitchen they have a coffee with them and chat and they consider of them,
you know,
they're friends often and it's
it's quite hard it really is hard to take that step away from that and just and and actually maybe some growers just you know they've got they've got they're bringing money in from somewhere else so they diversify whether it's solar whether it's commercial um buildings on the commercial letting you
know that's propping up a failing arable business so sometimes it's quite easy to sort of think you know we're not making any money out of the arable side but actually it doesn't really matter so much because we've got a bit of a
good income here but um and often farmers you know farmers are busy busy people generally and and um
And it's quite easy to spend a lot of time working hard,
sitting on the tractor,
doing stuff and not taking a step back and actually looking at the figures and thinking,
you know,
thinking about change and working out how to do it.
And maybe that was a benefit for me in 2018.
I had at least six months,
maybe longer,
where I was pretty much out of the business,
recovering.
And it just afforded me an opportunity to look at it with.
new eyes and and and take a different perspective on things right okay um yeah i sort of interrupted you a little bit you were talking about the whole system uh your whole farming system and then we stopped at a companion planting because i wanted to know more about that but maybe you could continue from there yeah
so um beyond that we we we still we we've now in the last couple years we we've um one of the guys on the farm is really interested in well both of them actually but they're interested in and
more livestock on the farm so we we purchased together um a um a red pole which is a suffolk it's a sort of native um breed um and uh so we've got about now about
40 uh red pole beef animals that we're looking to move around the farm in a sort of mob grazing um technique um we've got um
We've still got the flying flock,
Richard and
Katie's flying flock of sheep that come on the land.
And we've also got a very small free-range hen business.
And as we saw this morning,
we built this little egg mobile thing,
and we move them every three days around the farm.
So they're on fresh ground all the time,
and we're working with some nice local businesses to supply them with eggs and so on.
So,
yeah,
we've had some livestock integration.
And actually going just quickly on that point,
in,
when was it,
2021,
I think,
when we,
at the time we were just grazing the cover crops with our neighbour's sheep.
And then we thought,
no,
maybe we'll try grazing some winter cereal,
you know,
quite a forward winter cereal in February,
March time.
So we got them to bring their animals on and they grazed our winter cereal,
a winter wheat crop,
quite hard.
So...
they were acting a bit of doing some plant growth regulation eating some diseased leaf leaves we were getting some um free manure on the land um wait so your crop is still growing there yeah yeah the stock the crops still growing still growing and then you put the sheeps in and they don't destroy at all your your crops they just know no
so they ate it down you have to be a bit controlled i mean you don't want them to graze it really hard but this it was actually 2022 uh beginning of 2022 and it was a very um it was pretty warm spring
um very warm actually and um and the crop was actually growing growing away in february march and the sheep were on here on this 30 hectare field um the crop was probably maybe eight inches tall a winter cereal um and we allowed them to graze it down to maybe two to three inches and we did a you know we were quite strict they had um fairly
tight areas to graze and they were moved fairly regularly across the field anyway they came off the field and within um
Within a week or two,
the crop,
you know,
the last areas that they'd been on had totally recovered and was growing away.
And,
you know,
if you went on,
if you looked at that field two or three weeks after they'd left it,
you wouldn't see any,
it just looked like a normal week,
ungrazed wheat crop.
But that crop,
that field then yielded at harvest two tonnes a hectare more than any of the other winter wheat fields on the farm.
noticeably different crop soil types had the same treatment otherwise but it just had
grazing in the winter um early spring and it and it was incredible and did that cost you anything no they paid us for the great they paid us a bit of money for for the for the food for the winter food so we were like right okay uh so the new policy then from uh was right they'll graze cover crops they'll graze catch crops you know the crops the covers we put in between harvest and october when we made some winter cereals but
also they'll graze any winter sown crop be it rape um
Or a winter cereal.
um they will graze it in the wintertime so we have sheep on the land from early october right through until until march even later sometimes and you know their their um their effect can't cannot be underestimated i mean there's
a guy in gloucestershire ed horton who's a big quite a big social media kind of guy and um he talks about it quite a lot the the benefits of of of grazing on on you know regulating growth on these on these
often quite lush crops that then attract potentially disease so you're getting the sheep
doing some growth regulation and also some disease eating disease leaves so you then end up when the plant begins to grow again it's just fires up new perfectly green um leaves and um you know any disease issues have been um mitigated basically so it's
a great thing it's amazing so yeah we walked onto the the livestock yeah the livestock
Okay,
keep going.
Yeah,
so the light,
so yeah,
and actually this year,
so we got the red poll,
the beef animals a couple of years ago,
and actually so far they've just been on herbal lays.
They've been on some cover crops and grassland we've got on the farm.
But actually what we're looking to do this year,
I've been looking quite a lot of,
reading a bit about mob grazing and the proper,
you know,
the benefits.
And we just need to get the infrastructure in place.
But the plan this year is to,
when conditions allow,
so when it's not too wet,
is to allow possibly some of the animals,
well the beef herd
on some of the forward winter crops and just move them pretty fast across and just see what happens.
I mean,
I get it.
It's not for everyone on the heavier land.
In wet conditions,
you probably don't want animals,
particularly cows on the field,
but I think it could work for us.
And the great thing with sheep,
you know,
they're pretty light.
Their footfall's not really that noticeable,
so it works well for us.
And so you're getting the...
Some yield benefit,
you're getting free manure,
fertilizer,
and you're also getting,
you know,
we get paid to do it.
So I think generally the cost of,
we'll get paid by the sheep people for the feed.
And the cost,
the payment we get for them generally covers some of our,
if we have to buy seed,
any cover crop seed or whatever,
which we do sometimes have to do,
that's generally covered by,
and also sometimes the cost of the drill,
the pass for the drill.
So,
and that's covered by the...
by the sheep so it's a win-win yeah definitely so a lot of them the experts i spoke to in the last few days they told me that for them the ideal type of farming obviously depends on the context but in many cases is mixed farming a blend of arable permanent
permanent uh
crops like tree crops yeah and then integration of animals and well it seems like you you've gotten there already right you walked into the field this morning what i saw was um strips kind of like for arable fields lines of trees every was it 24 meters yeah yeah and now you're talking about integrating well sheep chickens
and and yeah right yeah right yeah it's it's um so that what we looked at this morning was an agroforestry scheme that we put in in um
A couple of years ago,
I've always been interested,
as I said earlier,
in putting in some environmental measures on the farm,
doing some environmental stewardship.
We farm around an old airbase.
So where you went this morning,
Raphael,
if we'd carried on a bit further,
it was an old Second World War American airbase.
It's pretty exposed up there.
There's not too much,
not many trees,
not many hedgerows.
I mean,
we've planted over the years.
put in a lot of lot of hedgerows we planted quite a few trees um along the edges of fields but we felt agroforestry always interested me actually putting trees in the field and the benefits that that can bring and um so yeah i started looking into this about three years ago we went to a few far some
forward-thinking guys in the uk stephen briggs up in near peterborough he's he's he's done i think he's he put in a silvo arable agroforestry scheme about um
late 80s i think it was wakelands which is close to us in suffolk similar sort of time you know they're kind of real trade blazers trailblazers in that world and um yeah and it was something i wanted to do just to just change the landscape really a bit um and so we got
some help locally with a really good guy um sam who who came on board and he's been our bit of our go between between the woodland trust who have been a massive help to us um in in
implementing this um and ourselves and um so what we looked at this morning was a 13 hectare field um we looked at some you know the suggestion is that to plant in a north south um axis
so you can so the cash crop that you grow between your trees doesn't get shaded out too much um and and then it was really
We were looking to try and work the scheme well with how we were farming,
so the size of our kit.
So how we've done it on the farm is we've planted four metre rows of a sort of pollen and nectar legume type mix,
and then 24 metres of a cash crop,
and then another four metre strip of pollen and nectar.
And in the four metre strip of pollen and nectar,
we've then been planting our trees.
So they're protected either side by a two metre sort of buffer.
And with the 24 meters of cash crop.
Our sprayer is 24 meters wide,
our drill is 4 meters wide,
combine around 8.
So it sort of works for the kit.
And I would definitely make sure you work,
if you're going to do it,
my advice would be make sure that the cash crop is significantly wide to work for your equipment.
And with regards to your...
your strip where the tree within which the trees sit um my view is and having spoken to other people is that four meters is probably the minimum width that you want to do to to allow the trees and the roots to kind of get going without interference um so
yeah we put that in and we with the trees we went for with sam's help was you know he was like what do you want to grow what and diversity is for me diversity uh in the arable crop and in anything that i do i like
I'm kind of,
that's key.
So what we've decided is we've planted four rows of,
which are in a sort of short rotation coppice system.
So in those rows,
we've predominantly gone with hazel and willow,
but we've also put in some sweet chestnuts and walnut and one or two other sort of native trees.
And then in the every other row,
we've gone with a fruit and nut row and we've gone with a real mix.
We've gone with two or three different apple types.
We've gone with plums.
quince cherry um green gauge apricot um and then with the nuts we've gone with almond again some more sweet chestnut and i think some more walnuts i've yeah a lot of diversity and we've we've rather
than kind of a block of apples and then a block of something else we've actually just i'm pretty sure in our agroforestry there's no tree two trees that stand together um that are the same yeah so a real mix and i get often get asked what the hell are you going to do when you Come to-
pick them exactly my next question here which is um yeah which is a valid point and um yeah i mean we we've spoken when i talked about this putting in this system i spoke to some local businesses we've got a local farm shop a few miles away and they're really interested in taking our fruit so we do have an outlet for that but and with the nuts similarly we have an outlet um but
when it comes down to picking
I'm not sure at the moment.
I mean,
it may be my children's problem.
I'm joking about that.
But,
you know,
it takes a long time for this five,
maybe 10 years for the system to really get going and start producing fruits and nuts and stuff.
But
I'm hoping maybe some volunteers.
We might look,
apart from supplying farm shops and so on,
we might look at a pick and,
you know,
what do you call it?
I am.
self-picking kind of yeah you come and pick or we we pick and then we maybe press a load of stuff and and sell some juice i i don't really know i mean it's yeah right it's a problem that's gonna yeah it's something it's an ongoing concern but uh but the priority was really put on on the health of the system on biodiversity and the diversity of trees yeah exactly and then the yeah and with the coppicing road just to go back to those that
lot we've got two wood chip boilers on the farm we're currently buying in wood chip
elsewhere and so um you know those hazels and those willows we can chip up and use in our wood chip boilers okay as well as for composting as well as for um maybe for hedge laying as well they're both both those species are good for for hedge laying um which we're trying to do a bit more of on the farm so that
they're gonna that's going to be useful for for many different things that you know that's just yeah just just uh for to make sure everyone's on board what do we mean by coppicing.
So,
um,
Probably when the plants get to probably 10 foot tall,
we will go through and we'll cut the plant,
cut those trees at almost ground level,
a few inches above ground level.
And then we'll remove the,
you know,
what we've cut for whatever we want to use it for,
as discussed a short while ago.
And then that plant will just shoot again from base level and get going again.
So it's just a continuum,
really.
It just keeps going.
It's a pretty good generation for biomass.
yeah yeah for biomass for wood chip for composting um and for hedge laying really or our three three markets for that the the fruit trees and fruit and nut trees did you um select certain varieties that uh are ripe at the you know at the same time for for harvesting or did you know that is the duration and the way you so so the great thing in the uk and i don't know how long this will run,
but currently the Woodland Trust,
we...
You can do it privately,
you can do it off your own back,
you know,
pay for everything yourself,
but actually we approached the Woodland Trust and they've been really helpful.
They came out,
they looked at our proposals and they approved our scheme and they've supplied us with everything by the labour.
So that's trees,
guards around the trees,
wooden stakes,
fasteners and so on.
And they're really good trees too,
but they have to be
native trees you know rootstock native rootstock or um or native trees so um so yeah um
We've been following their guidelines and they've been working with us.
And so all we have to pay for it is the labour.
And that's not to be underestimated.
It takes a huge amount.
And we planted two or three thousand trees in that field that we looked at this morning.
And not only is the planting,
you know,
not only have you got to plant the tree,
we put a wood chip mulch around the base of all those trees to act as a weed suppressor and also to try and hold the moisture underneath.
And then...
four posts with the fruit and nut trees four posts one one to attach the tree to and then three posts in a sort of triangular shape around that tree about a meter apart each post with a with a sort of waist high sorry a chest high maybe four foot high um plastic
and netting around to try and prevent deer um and whatever else from eating those trees and deer are a big problem for us so um yeah
So the Woodland Trust have been amazing.
But other people,
you know,
you can do it privately,
you can do it yourself.
I have a very small favor to ask.
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Thank you.
So the Woodland Trust,
who are they?
Are they government funded?
Because you said that they provided all of this for free,
so I suppose someone must pay for that?
No,
they're a charity,
right?
A large charity with the aim to protect ancient woodland and also to basically encourage a lot more tree and hedge planting.
around the UK and I don't know when it all began but they're they're a great organization and and you know they're fully behind agroforestry schemes among many other schemes but they
I feel now that agroforestry is becoming more sort of popular in the UK and
I don't know how how long that support is going to be there so my advice to any other growers would be you know if they want to go down this route is is get on with it because you know it's not cheap to to if you to do it off your own back it's not it's not a cheap
excursion so you know to have them behind me is fantastic and the other great thing with them is you know we've had some tree losses over the last year or two with drought and whatever else and they've kindly replaced any any lost lost trees which is fantastic it
is fantastic so that they've paid for the trees for the equipment around the trees obviously then you you then have to deal with those trees and to,
how much work is that?
So the pruning,
actually we've done a bit of pruning,
but about a day's work currently.
So not too onerous.
I mean,
one of the things we're looking to do this year is probably to remulch a lot of the trees.
And again,
that's going to take a bit of time,
a few days work for an individual,
I think.
How many trees do you have?
There's about two and a half thousand in that field.
But,
you know,
the coppice ball trees,
we just leave them to their own devices for the time being.
You know,
there will come a point,
obviously,
when we have to coppice them five,
ten years'
time.
But at the moment,
it's just leave them to it.
Okay,
five,
ten years'
time.
So you just let them grow it and one day you're just going to come and just completely…
Yeah,
and that's probably…
I'm sure that could probably be done mechanically.
I haven't looked into it,
but I'm sure there's some good…
Maybe a good…
Apart from a chain…
Obviously,
a chainsaw,
but something a bit more…
A bit quicker than would be available to…
to do that something on the back of a tractor perhaps that can you'd imagine there there would be ways to do that fairly efficiently compared to pruning a tree carefully choosing which uh which branches you want to keep or not and so on it takes almost like a specific expert on that yeah but this is you know the whole thing it's
gonna you know it's a long-term um investment really and objective um i think Thank you.
I'm hoping in time that the trees where we where we allow our beef animals at the moment there's not much shade and I've suddenly realized that actually shading is really really important for animals to because yeah obviously in the summer and baking hot we
have got some areas where there's some trees but a lot of the places that they go there isn't the shade and also for the chickens you know they like scratching around under
under trees and i was listening to something recently a guy was saying that he's seeing significant increase in productivity with his free-range hens when they're in a wooded environment it's more natural for them they feel they don't worry about predators or
anything from above and they just they just perform better so um it's really about thinking systemically right and you have all of these different parts of your system and they all can complement each other and feed into each other.
Yeah.
And the,
The whole becomes much greater than the sum of the parts.
Yeah,
exactly.
It's way more,
you know,
it's just more interesting as well.
It gives you more joy.
I love,
you know,
I love seeing,
one of the guys on the farm,
who's kind of quite a keen sort of bird man,
when he joined us or a year in,
he said,
this place,
he said,
you've just got more of the species,
the farmland birds that I see on other farms.
And you've also,
I'm seeing birds I've never seen before elsewhere here,
which is just...
very empowering it's nice to hear yeah so i know we're doing right for wildlife it's just yeah do you also see and feel that the the differences yeah i mean yeah i do i mean i see um we definitely got more hairs than than you
know um do you get yeah you get hairs of course you do in europe yeah yeah um so i'm saying i see a lot more hairs um than i used to see we're seeing more gray partridge around them we used to see in fact um a guy who i do a bit of work with um he
He was talking to his wife a couple of weeks ago and they were talking about grey partridge.
It's quite an endangered species in the UK.
You don't see many of them.
And this guy said to his wife,
he said he was coming up here a few days later.
He said to his wife,
I know where I'll see some English partridge and which are the grey partridge.
And he arrived and we were standing on the edge of a field chatting.
And this,
you know,
group of maybe eight of them got up in front of us.
And he was just like,
it gave him a lot of pleasure.
And me too.
Amazing.
Yeah,
yeah.
You just said that,
you know,
farming this way brings you a lot of joy.
Yeah,
yeah,
it does.
I mean,
not only for wildlife,
but also,
you know,
collaborations with businesses.
In the past,
the way we used to farm,
a lot of conventional farming is,
you know,
we're growing feed.
They're growing feed.
It goes into animal feed.
Loaded on a lorry,
you don't know where it goes.
It's gone and so on.
Now we're just working with lots of businesses that...
appreciate how we're farming and there's a much you know we're growing food not feed and we're working with businesses who appreciate us and that and um and actually we're getting premiums for that so um yeah you know going down the wheat for instance we're getting significant premiums growing for wild farms i think we've spoken about them a bit in the last day or two yeah
you know a relatively new business um started up a few years ago um and their remit is to
to produce flour and grain that has had received no pesticides at all and limited amounts of synthetic fertilizer and also for as a grower that's what we have to adhere to and also we have to have some livestock integration on their farms they they want mixed farms on board um
and um you know so there are various parameters we need to reach to to work with them but the premiums are significant you
compared to the...
global whatever the national commodity the commodity prices that we're seeing um almost double um currently um the price at which you sell your yeah so the wheat we're producing now with the the price we agreed with wild farmed um last
year is nearly double um the price that a conventional grower would get for his wheat from this harvest so i mean massive and i look i don't know how long that's going to remain the case but it's fantastic at the moment and they're selling that
the flour and bread to artisan bakers and to a lot of some pizza firms franco manca ask pizza quite big chains of pizza restaurants they're selling their bread and flour in several supermarkets as well i mean it's it's
building momentum and people are much more interested in they don't want that they don't want they're interested in where their food comes from and they don't want stuff covered in chemicals really so um you
yeah it's great for them um and it's good for us yes you you've uh very conveniently opened up the next chapter of the conversation about you know who you sell your product produced to and how that side of things work and so here you you started by talking about wild farm yeah uh they're
fairly famous in the regenerative agriculture space especially here in the uk but um but for the people who have not heard about them yet when you just explained sort of very quickly and summarized what they do,
but could we just...
how to say zoom in and explain in more detail how this works for you as a farmer and how they operate with you yeah so they were they were set up by three guys one of them andy is um is the farmer really amongst the three of them and um you
know he he was um he runs an organic farm originally in france and then um he was in the music world before then but um he had organic farm in france and then latterly and currently in in the uk in the west
and um and the other two guys um they're all really driven about um you know producing healthy food and and how pretty screwed up our food system is and wanting to try and change that um so they set up the business they were looking for growers who were also um on board with how
they wanted to um uh accept food um and and grow food so um
Yeah,
there's now around 100 maybe more growers who are on board with them.
And we're all regenerative farmers,
farming in similar ways,
but all very empowered with what we're doing.
And it's a really,
it's a wonderful movement to be involved with.
And going back to how we need to,
what their sort of stipulations are.
At the moment,
in fact,
we're supplying them now with oats.
uh and wheat but they will also if the nitrogen levels are correct in the malting barley they will also accept some malting barley so they're looking to go into the um beer beer world um but um yeah we we you're not allowed to use any from the planting of the crop to the harvest of the crop you're not allowed to use any pesticides at
all in the growing of that crop and you're allowed to use um you know
uh significantly smaller amounts of synthetic fertilizers to help grow that crop so um i think this year the rate was around 120 kilos of synthetic fertilizer allowable in the crop per hectare and how does that compare to what a conventional half
so it's half the synthetic fertilizer and i think what they like like you to do is you're allowed to apply around two-thirds of that in
In split doses,
in two doses,
they say two lots of 40 kilos.
And then beyond that,
it's sort of means tested.
So what we're doing a lot of on the farm and have done for a few years is sap analysis.
So taking tissue samples from the plant,
sending them off to a lab and getting results back of what that plant is deficient in,
in terms of elements.
So,
and then,
and then what we do is we will get that information back within two or three days and then we'll act accordingly.
And,
you know,
having,
having gone down from very conventional,
quite aggressive levels of synthetic fertilizer,
when we started doing saps,
um,
three or four years ago,
we,
we've never seen any of our plants deficient in nitrogen.
So when you get the return back,
the analysis from your...
Yeah,
we get the analysis back.
The issues we get on our soils are the plant is deficient in magnesium,
manganese sometimes,
maybe silicon,
copper occasionally,
iron sometimes,
but never nitrogen,
which suggests to me that we don't need to apply.
The plant has adequate amounts of nitrogen in it.
So we have a tendency to think that if it's not growing well enough,
it's because it doesn't have enough nitrogen.
But actually,
it's all of these other elements a lot of the time that are missing.
Yeah,
exactly right.
So the last sort of 20,
30,
40 kilos is kind of based on,
with wild farmed,
is based on what you receive back from your sap analysis.
And then,
you know,
on our farm,
we tailor a sort of mix together to then use on the crop,
which might be a 10 kilo amount of foliar end mixed with some sulfur.
So we mix up a tank load of,
so a very,
very small amount of nitrogen.
but sulfur also isn't i forgot to mention sulfur but that's sometimes a limiting factor as well on these soils so a bit of a nitrogen sulfur mix that applies about 10 kilos of nitrogen and then we also add some fish hydrolysate which is an organic um sort of fertilizer it contains all sorts of things but it's a really good um organic
product maybe some manganese some always some magnesium um and maybe some seaweed some liquid seaweed um
which again is just a good organic fertilizer and soil improver so we just make a mix of that and apply it in a foliar form through the sprayer straight onto the crop and we'll do that a couple of times to maybe three times at the end of the the back end of the season to grow the crop and that's allowable so we'll go up we won't we don't actually often hit their their limits so just a quick question is so you said that last third of fertilizer
that's allowed
by wild farm but depending you said it's depending on your yeah i think it's based on yeah do you have to actually communicate your sap analysis results with them as well to prove that yeah so actually they they pay for the sap analysis um and currently the saps have to go off to uh the
netherlands there's no no lab in the uk
It seems to be the only lab in the world.
Even the American,
they send their stuff out.
It seems insane.
It's really strange that you wouldn't see more labs popping up.
Yeah,
well,
I think I'm getting the impression that we need to watch this space because I suspect there'll be one here before too long.
But yeah,
currently everything's sent over there.
And,
you know,
there's a cost to it.
And anyway,
kindly,
they cover that cost.
And the information is sent to them and to us.
And actually...
I mean,
we use Ben,
and so I'll chat through with our Regen consultant,
Ben,
but otherwise for growers that don't have a Ben or someone that they can use to go through the results,
there's Ed at Wildfound or probably one or two other people that can help analyse those results and probably tailor a mix of trace elements to apply accordingly.
Okay.
So they're very...
Yeah,
the other thing I like is that they kind of,
you know,
we work together.
They're very hands-on.
There's lots of farm growers meetings and lots of interaction with everyone and
WhatsApp groups and,
you know,
even more localised regional meetings amongst the wild farmers of East Anglia.
So you get to meet the other farmers from Europe.
And the lovely thing is everyone's doing something slightly different and it's just a great...
seat of learning it's a bit like groundswell but in a on a very small level yeah so you said no no pesticides yes and no limited amount of uh fertilizer yeah yeah they like to see they like to almost without exception i think they
have to they want livestock integration on the farm um so i don't think it necessarily has to be in the growing of that crop that you're growing for them but they want you to be uh they
you know they're backing regenerative farms so so mixed farming is cool and that's what they want to see they want to see cover crops everywhere um and you know when you grow with them you're kind of in it hopefully for a relatively long term and i'm you know we're moving around we're moving obviously we're not cropping the
same field with a winter wheat growing for wild farm every year so we're moving that those crops around all the time so it's a whole farm sort of approach um
with livestock,
with cover crops,
and,
you know,
with how we're farming,
we're not using pesticides.
on the growing of crops anyway so it sort of it just it just works for us um and and we're not um i i think they would they would struggle they wouldn't want to work with a grower that says you know right we'll grow that field for of wheat for wild farm but on our other fields of wheat we're going to be very conventional and we're going to spray and all the rest of it so committed
it's committed yes it's a good commit it's a commitment but it's um uh they they pay well they pay well
and their clients are prepared to pay a bit more with the knowledge that that has come from a good source,
a clean source.
Okay.
And so you said that then you get to sell that wheat,
for example,
at a premium?
Yeah.
What does it look like?
The premium?
Yes.
Well,
so the price that we were offered for the 2025 harvest that's just happened,
was offered to us.
in the summer of 2024 and that price was 285 pounds a ton and i think the wheat price at the time on on the sort of um global market here was about um maybe 220 something like that so it's a nice markup
um and where are we now we've harvested our crop you know the commodity prices have just generally slipped over the last few months the fact is you know we've had a drought
in Europe,
haven't we?
But for us in the UK,
it's been mega too.
And yields have been down.
But actually,
commodity prices,
it's a global thing.
It's not what happens necessarily in Europe.
And they've just slipped off.
There's a massive global surplus of grain anyway.
And prices have pretty much fallen off a cliff.
I was offered £159 a ton a few days ago for wheat.
But thankfully,
we've still got that £285 for the wheat that we've got in our shed.
is being sold for 285 pounds almost double almost double yeah and they can afford to pay more because they they're creating an extra revenue from selling regenerative products because people are willing to pay more for those yes products yes yeah exactly right yeah yeah so it's um yeah
it's a good it's a good arrangement at the moment and the other thing which i'll briefly touch on is that wildfarm have been pretty instrumental in trying to so so because
When subsidies were being phased out over these last few years,
the government introduced something called the Sustainable Farming Incentive here in the UK.
And it was a way for farmers to draw in an income,
a payment for farming in a better way.
So there were lots of options for which if you adhere to them,
you could obtain a bit of a payment.
So not using insecticides.
not moving soils,
no till,
companion cropping,
low input cereals.
There were lots of other different options you could,
and there were payments available for these if you were to adhere to them while subsidies were being phased out.
And Wildfarm were great because low input cereals in particular is one that very much suits the way we farm with them.
And they've been working a lot with DEFRA.
governing body about um you know how wild farmers are farming and and what uh options we can access um and actually they've been a bit of our go-between because it's really hard to deal with defra like it probably is all over the world dealing with these government bodies and getting answers they've
got they've got a good in with some good people some good ministers so that's been really really helpful um i won't go on
too much with the SFI as I call it the sustainable as we call it the sustainable farming incentive but currently that whole system is on a hold which is a unbelievable shame because it's been a it was a you know we spoke about getting good advisors
independent advisors to help change your farming system but that
SFI was a great leg up for people that wanted to change but were scared to to to do it so they could actually draw a payment you
for farming in a better way um to mitigate perceived risk of of change um and you know i i don't know what's what the future looks like but it's been on hold for about a year now they're not accepting any new entrants to it it's a three-year term we've still got a couple of years left on our sfi scheme so we're still receiving
payments for that but
going forward that it's pretty uncertain but um anyway i'm very thankful yeah i know but it's yeah it is crazy it is completely irrational we i mean we've spoken a lot in the last few days about the hidden cost of food you know yeah the massive hidden cost of food we know we have numbers lots of studies today showing that you know for every pound
that a person pays at the supermarket there's between
one and three pounds of hidden cost in in health care in environmental damage in plenty of things yeah and that's you know the well we came to the conclusion that actually spending a bit of that that money that
public budget uh into incentivizing farmers to to farm with nature yeah uh is actually an amazing investment because it costs very little compared to how much it's you gain yeah as a society as a government with your own your budget right so it just feels crazy that you would you would go
in the right direction do something that's that's clearly helping and working and then just yeah i totally agree i mean i you know food's food's always been really cheap in the uk Okay.
And,
you know,
really farmers have got their income from a subsidy.
I don't know how it is in Europe,
but that's been often a farmer's income.
So now that's gone,
either food has got to become way more expensive,
but I'm not sure the supermarkets are going to kind of allow that.
I don't know how that's going to work.
Or farmers have got to derive an income somewhere,
so it's got to be via a sustainable farming incentive type scheme.
So
I can't see food prices going up massively,
unfortunately,
for a long time.
It's going to be very gradual.
And by that time,
if there's no SFI or equivalent,
most farmers are going to be out of business.
That's why it would make so much sense for governments to open their eyes to the fact that they are currently spending a lot of money trying to fix the mess that we're creating with these extractive
intensive conventional systems.
Yeah.
And that's just taken away some of that,
you know,
that budget and just re-injecting it where it really matters and where it makes a huge difference would be such an obviously good thing to do.
It would.
But as we said yesterday,
you know,
governments,
they're changing all the time and,
well,
you know,
every few years and no one seems to be in charge for long enough to kind of make really good decisions.
Having a long-term vision.
Yeah,
having a long-term vision.
So we flip between different ministers.
Half of them don't seem to know a huge amount about agriculture.
They've come from foreign policy,
whatever it might be.
But they're politicians,
but they're not necessarily experts in our space.
And yeah,
so it's a bit like a headless chicken,
I think,
unfortunately.
Yeah,
indeed.
So yeah,
for a big part of what you grow,
then you have this collaboration with Wild Farm.
Yeah,
so we have the collaboration with Wild Farms.
We've got a collaboration with a business called Hodmer Dodds,
who are a Suffolk-based pulse business,
beans,
peas,
and so on.
And we've been working with them for a few years.
I used to go to primary school from the age of five with the founder,
Joe Sire.
He's a lovely guy.
And he's got great intentions,
and he's a really good man in this space.
So I started...
growing with him growing for him um about four years ago i think beans maybe initially and then we went into carl nps and via josiah we started working also with the bold bean company and also holland and barrett who he supplies with our carl nps but
the the bold bean uh you know they're they're um they're another really positive um you
fast-growing business that was set up by Amelia,
who I get on well with,
and was supplying them with carlins that are sold,
I think,
via Ocado,
which is sort of a delivery-type business.
They were in Waitrose.
I'm not sure whether they're still in that space,
but the carlin peas are very high.
I think they're the highest protein pulse in the market.
delicious to eat so um i tried them i tried them yesterday evening and i you know in a salad i was making here and they're absolutely delicious i'm i'm a big fan of uh of beans and uh and in general and and eat them a lot and actually this is some of the best ones i've ever tried thank you well i think um i mean the carlins were growing
uh we're eating a lot in the uk i think in the
1800s and then they kind of went out of fashion out of fashion as people got wealthier and Dean's beans and peas to be a bit...
I don't know,
sort of inferior product.
So they've sort of been phased out.
But they're still eating a bit in parts of the UK.
But then arrives Josiah a lot of years ago with a bit of a mission to kind of get this,
you know,
build this market because it's such a wonderful,
healthy source of protein.
And yeah,
so it's been really fun working with those guys.
And I just love that.
It's just lovely working with other people that want to.
approve of what appreciate how we do things and um you know want to do good things in the food and farming space really so um we work with so we work with those guys and on a much kind of lower level and very local level we also work with a wonderful local bake bakery called Worcester's and
um we started I think they came on one of our farm walks and then I spoke to the sort of patriarch of that business and he said look we'd love to take some of your wheat pesticide free wheat for milling
and use it in one of our loaves so they're now producing a loaf called the neteshaw wild and that's sure is our village they call it they call it the natural water and it's a pesticide free um
They mill the wheat and produce their own flour,
and then it's grown with that flour.
And there's a story,
you go into their shop in Bury St Edmunds and more locally,
and they've got sort of signs up with us.
It's just a nice story.
And then they came round.
When that all started,
I had all their employees,
maybe 20 or 30 of them came round,
and we did a farm walk.
We'd only recently taken ownership of the eggmobile and the hens out on the field,
and they
we were looking at them and talking about them and the benefits for soil health and whatnot of that and and and we got talking about the eggs and what i was going to do with the eggs and they said well look we need a ton of eggs each week um so and we do have a supplier already but we'd love to take some of yours as well so we work with them we supply them with some eggs for their baking so
it's just yeah it's lovely i just i just enjoy working with people rather than sticking it all on lorry and waving it goodbye and never seeing it again so
Better for the profit and better for the goal as well.
Yeah,
it must be so much more gratifying that you're working hard,
growing food,
but you can see the final products.
In the case of the peas,
the calling peas,
it's a beautiful product that's well marketed and everything,
and that's delicious,
but you can actually enjoy yourself in your own kitchen.
Exactly.
Or the wild farm products that are also in the shop.
Yeah,
yeah.
In this case,
the local bread,
at least.
What you produce,
you can see the results of.
You can see that this is great quality.
Out of what we do.
I mean,
I think in the years from 2003 to 2020,
I don't think we had,
we didn't have any farm tours.
We didn't host any events on the farm.
Like I just,
I don't think I was like,
you know,
the way we were farming,
reaching for the can,
every can of chemical you pick up has got warnings,
toxic to something,
this and that.
I just wasn't proud of anything we were doing on the farm,
but since we've changed,
you know,
we've had,
we probably host maybe...
four events a year we have um a few farm walks a year we school tours i write in a couple of parish magazine local parish magazines um it's just i'm absolutely so proud of what we do and i love i love showing people around and the and
and locally you know we've it's a bit like grant the sort of rising popularity of groundswell the regen ag show that i met you at a couple of years ago
which has gone from sort of 900 people in 2018 or so when it started to whatever it is now,
12,000,
15,000.
So too with our local farm walk,
just for locals here that may or may not have any real knowledge of the food and farming business or industry,
but they just like what we're doing.
And when we started a few years ago,
maybe
10 people turned up.
Last year we had 90 or 100.
You know,
it's just,
it's fantastic.
And as I said to you with that rocket hive,
that beehive we've got up there,
we had a lady come and this lovely local girl came around and just loves what we're doing and wanted to buy something for the farm.
She wanted to buy a gift for the farm.
And so she bought us this wild beehive,
which is just so kind.
And so it's really cool.
You showed me this this morning.
It's sort of like structure on some big wooden legs.
Yeah.
And it's quite a big tree trunk kind of thing.
And that was quite hollowed inside.
And it's just,
it's been kind of.
Yeah.
built into this uh this uh what is it yeah yeah it's a beehive it's a wild for wild bees ideally um but they're you know like everywhere and globally you know space for lots of species is reducing
all the time um so it's just creating a nice um good environment for those for the wild bees that um don't have anywhere to go these days with um you know with um developments and god knows what so yeah you seem very
passionate and very excited about what you're doing and generally speaking quite quite happy i mean this feeling i'm getting from you yeah um total second wind in farming total second wind yeah just love it yeah and how has that you know evolved since the days where you were sort of farming more conventionally do you feel like this this whole transition has really changed your personal mental
health and well-being in general yes i would i think i'm a i think i'm a happier person
I I
I feel like also we have a better work-life balance.
Like initially when you change,
I certainly in the old system,
we were a lot busier,
way busier with more track to time,
rush,
rush kind of thing.
Busy,
I think I was a bit of a busy fool.
You know,
we're rushing around without,
you need to sometimes take a step back and see and assess.
And that's probably what got me into a bit of a pickle when I had my accident,
if I'm honest,
rushing.
um so now i think we're we're much more okay it's been it's it's taken a while um to get everyone totally on board with it with the way we're farming but we we the guys are spending less time on the tractors we're
doing probably a bit more management time uh but more crop walking more research and so on but that i i enjoy all of that a lot more but also a lot more time spent with family and friends.
And I think...
that's great for me personally but also for the two guys that work for us i guess i mean we try and look after them i think we look after them pretty well financially and uh and so on but i you know they could probably go to a way bigger farm and work around
the clock and earn more money but they won't see their family and i think they like the balance and it's so important you know we talk about mental health it's a big thing these days uh and um
And particularly with farming,
a lot of suicides,
a lot of time spent alone.
The way we're farming now,
there's way less time spent alone.
The two guys work together on most things.
You know,
they're not centre.
One's over there on that field and one's over there.
Most of the stuff they're doing,
they're doing together or with me.
And it's just,
it's more of a collaboration between us.
And I feel from my point of view,
it's not,
we're all learning.
We're all still learning.
him.
you know it's a gradual thing um i want them on board with me as much as possible and so hence we go to we're all learning to we go to groundswell that will have a couple of days off the farm go there they'll go to whatever talks they want to go to and we're just we're just yeah it's it's and they come with ben and it's just and
i and i honestly think if they left this farm they would not go back to a conventional business like they're seeing Thanks.
the fruits of their labors,
whether it's the amount of worms in the soil,
wildlife,
they come to some of the wild farm meetings,
you know,
they're just way more bought into it and I just don't think they go back to that sort of conventional system,
even if the money was better.
That's fantastic.
Most of the listeners of this podcast will know by now that the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast is Sol Capital and I know that you're
enrolled in the sole capital program is that right yes that's quite recently though yeah quite recently um we signed up with them about a year ago and um we're not at the stage yet where we could look to maybe sell some carbon credits um but we might be in probably
in the middle of next year hopefully so yeah maybe too early to to speak about the benefits to your you know
to your farm and to your right but but maybe we could talk about the process itself um because a big worry sometimes it's because you have a lot of administration work to do and so what kind of so the process so the the process for us was to um to
put in data from the current year and previous years historical data uh with what we'd done on the fields in terms of um uh
tillage,
pesticides,
fertilizers,
harvesting,
removal of straw,
whatever,
cover cropping,
a real mix.
So they wanted the history of the fields.
And that can be quite exhaustive.
I mean,
we keep data on farm software anyway.
So we've got data back for the last 15 plus years.
So we've got that to hand.
but
The great thing with Soil Capital was that
I was liaising with one of the girls there and we went through it together.
And actually,
what could have been for quite a non-techie man like me,
a good couple of days of messing about and lots of phone calls to the office.
It turned out to be half to two-thirds of a day with her going through it and putting the data in.
So we did that.
Thanks.
I'm now in a position to input my 2025 harvest data,
which I'll do with her via a Zoom call probably quite soon.
And then I believe,
as I understand it,
perhaps in the middle of next year,
we might be in a position to sell some carbon credits.
And I know carbon seems to be quite a debatable topic,
and I don't really know enough about it to comment too much about it,
but I just feel that the way we're farming,
you know we're sequestering carbon and why not look to derive a bit of an income from from the way we're farming a bit like the sfi you know farming's you know on its knees um
globally well certainly with in europe by the sound of it um and so um yeah any income is better than nothing so um yeah we'll see how this i don't know how much we could potentially derive but i it's certainly something to worth looking at i would advise for any regen grower um
Amazing.
Yes.
For the question of,
you know,
the carbon markets and the soil capital's vision on this,
we just did recently an amazing episode with Andrew,
the head of impact there.
So if anyone's interested in learning more about this,
they definitely go back and listen to this episode.
Yeah,
it was great.
One last question about them,
though,
is that what made you decide to join the program?
What appealed to you?
So I had looked at carbon with another business.
uh probably about three years ago and it kind of didn't really yield anything um i spent quite a bit of time putting data in and and then it turned out that there were weren't any buyers for the credits and we did start speaking to a vertical farming business but it just sort of didn't really go anywhere um and
then i spoke to another another business in the uk um and actually it was it was a different sort of system it was actually coming to this guy was was going to send
people to the farm to actually do some core samples go around the farm take some soil samples and and assess carbon levels in the soil and then return a year or two years later and take go to the same spot and take more core samples and see and so you had a quantifiable um amount
of carbon to potentially sell but and those carbon credits as i understand it are worth a lot more so potentially the income we could derive.
would be greater but um the cost of that um initial survey initial sampling and then again was was was significant like we just didn't have the money to do that um and you know with soil capital i've had uh so so which led me to soil capital basically um i've
got friends that that sort of sell carbon through them and some of their advisors who i respect um
I think they're the best or one of the best to work with.
So,
yeah,
I got in touch with them.
And currently,
yeah,
costs have been zero as far as I can recall.
Maybe an initial small cost,
I can't remember,
but very low anyway.
So going back to the previous guy with the source,
I probably potentially could have earned more money,
but actually
I just didn't have the funds to.
to begin that journey.
So I'm very happy with Soul Capital.
We're currently traveling
England for a few days,
recording nine episodes in nine days.
And
I thought it'd be kind of fun to ask every guest to come up with a question for the following one.
And yesterday we were at the University of East
Anglia, if I'm not mistaken,
in Norwich,
talking to Professor Nitya Rao.
And the question she had for you was,
um,
Well,
people like her in universities doing studies,
especially on farming and food,
if you could ask them to focus on something,
on studying something that you find interesting or that would be relevant for you,
what would you ask them to study?
Good question.
For me,
I'm quite interested in sort of farmed chemicals that we're seeing in foods.
And I don't know a lot about it,
but a couple of years ago,
there was a study done in the States,
and they found traces of a product called Clormaquat in breakfast cereals.
Clormaquat is a plant growth regulator.
It's a straw stiffener widely used in cereal crops all over the world.
It's very cheap.
and they've found that clormaquat is a uh affects um reproductive
organs in a in a bad way um obviously these are minute levels um in breakfast cereals but it i just thought that's really that's not good news um at all and uh and i would i'd love more research to be done in sort of in that space so what you
know in conventional growing there's a lot of chemicals used um how much of that actually ends up on on the grain or the bean or the pea or whatever it is.
And what is that doing to us?
What is that doing to our health?
Each specific sort of chemical.
That's super,
super important.
I think it goes back to this question about the true cost of food,
right?
So here,
like the impact on human health,
basically from conventional agriculture,
because you could find out more about that and have a more clear information about.
what it does to us,
to our health,
and how much it costs us to also deal with those health issues,
then maybe we'd have this extra incentive to get off these chemicals and to reward farmers who farm in harmony with nature in a way that's healthy for people.
Exactly.
And the amounts are so...
tiny aren't they that that's probably why the research hasn't really been done i mean people speak about protein bars on a slight slight tangent and how some of the stuff that goes into those bars is isn't is really not you know causes heart disease and blah cancer and all this stuff at certain levels but because it's they're such tiny levels no
no research is really done and these products just escape scrutiny um so i'd love to know a bit more about you know what we're doing as farmers
that we're seeing on our food stuff.
So send that her way,
please.
Yeah,
I will.
And then,
so the second part of this question,
well,
not question,
but this idea of sharing questions between guests is that we are visiting another farmer tomorrow called David Whitley.
Not too far from here,
about an hour northwest in Cambridgeshire.
Is there any questions that you would like?
yes um
I suppose it's a bit of a general question and no one really knows the answer,
but you know there's an incredible sort of malaise in agriculture.
There's been surveys done recently that suggest that something like 60%
of farmers surveyed don't think they'll be farming in 10 years time.
80%
don't think it'll be.
a generational thing i you know farms will be sold whatever um there seems to be such yeah such and sort of negativity about everything and it's difficult to get out of this sort of torpor of of
of how difficult things are and that's to be fair it's for a lot of industries at the moment we're not farmers agriculture isn't just the only one but i'd love to know his what his sort of
vision is for the UK farming in 10 years time?
What are we going to see?
Bloody great farms run by large sort of corporations somehow benefiting from economies of scale and still continuing to produce pretty crap food?
Or are we going to be looking at more regenerative policies,
you know,
processes and more regenerative farming?
Hopefully that's the case.
and more interaction,
which I think he does,
but like I do with good businesses that appreciate how you farm more solar.
How is it going to look?
I'd love to know his view on that.
And obviously for me,
a big thing is wildlife.
And we're the most wildlife depleted country in Europe,
which is just a horrendous shame.
And at least on our farm,
I feel like we're...
we're making positive inroads into improving that situation but it's we're just a we're just a small piece in a large jigsaw and this sort of stuff needs to be done at a landscape scale so you know just his his idea of how things are going to evolve it's just a it's a very broad question but i'd love his his opinion awesome
great thank you so much we're going to uh close close this conversation here,
but thank you so much,
James.
First of all,
for hosting us here in your farm for the last couple of days.
It's been really a pleasure to spend some time with you.
I learned so much.
And then thank you also for taking the time today and for sharing your experience,
your journey,
your knowledge with the listeners of the Deep Seed podcast.
Thank you so much.
Yeah,
it's been a pleasure to have you here from two years ago at Groundswell.
It's that lovely moment of meeting and...
sharing ideas and talking and and both finding a as you do at that show a love of um making things better in the food and farming sector um it's been great to have you both here and um and uh hopefully see you at groundswell in uh july i hope so yes yeah thank you for taking care bye