Social Networking. Get with The Now Granddad!

When I first came home to farm in the mid 1980’s our local market town still had a livestock market and was the weekly collecting point for farmers to meet and chew the cud. I didn’t actually have any livestock, but I knew a few who did so I would still go for a chat and to see how their prices faired.

The auctioneers also had a barn there with odd bits and pieces for auction, not all even agricultural but it was always fun to poke about and see if you could pick up a bargain. As well as that there was a chap who used to sell plants and fruit trees and most of the apple trees we have on the farm today originated from that market.

After the sales we would wander down to the Market Tavern for a pint and a gossip before returning home feeling refreshed and having gleaned a little information from friends and neighbours about wether or not they were caught up with spraying, a moan about the wheat price or a good boast about how good your yields had been that harvest.

As is the way of many livestock markets ours is now a huge shopping centre ionically named “The Arc”, rendered stockless by the acres of paving slabs and shops.

Since the market’s demise the only place that farmers regularly meet in our area is on either the hunting or the shooting field, but recently with social networking that has all changed.

Now I know that there is no substitute for meeting in the flesh whilst participating in something that we all enjoy, but I probably know more about what my contemporaries are doing at any given time now than I ever did. My new farmer “friends” are generally not my neighbours and not even necessarily in my own country let alone county, but none the less, they go some way in providing that farming contact and information that I used to get at the market.

At the end of August this year after a big family sort out, I decided to record a year in short video clips of my farm with the aid of my video recording mobile phone. Because time is short, none of my clips are rehearsed and they are strictly single-take events to avoid the process being too much of a burden. If something occurs during the day that I think might be interesting to farmers or non-farmers alike, I whip out my phone and talk over a brief clip of about 1 to 2 minutes long to explain and show what we are currently doing. 

The original reason for doing it was so that I could give my children a recording of the first year of me owning the whole farming business, but then I thought that it might also be interesting to put the clips on YouTube so that I could share them with others. 

I was convinced that nobody would ever find my channel, but it was amazing how quickly people stumbled upon it. I have only had it up and running since 30th August this year and I have had nearly 4,500 uploaded views and have 22 subscribers who are mainly from the UK, but also from Ireland, Denmark, Austria and from Greece. Looking at the data from the uploads, nearly 60% are from the UK with the majority of the remainder coming from the US, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Slovakia, Finland, Slovenia and Greece. 

Even though it is interesting to look over the hedge to see what your neighbours are doing, it’s even more interesting to see other farmers clips about what they are doing in other parts of the UK or in other European countries. Somebody is always planting seed or harvesting crops somewhere. 

Then there are the possibilities for exchange of information. I have just started getting a few comments about some of my clips, mainly asking why we do things the way we do, but also suggestions of how to over-come problems that I have publicised during recording a clip.

The other social medium that I am really enjoying is Twitter. The common misconception is that that “Tweets” are solely used for telling your “followers” that you have, “Just been into the kitchen to make a cup of tea”. In my experience nothing could be further from the truth. I use it for letting people know when I have just put another clip up on YouTube, but mainly I use it for sharing articles that I think that the people who follow me might find interesting and reading articles that people I follow think that I might find useful.

In the farming world there is plenty happening on Twitter. For example if you follow The NFU, Farmers Weekly, Organic Farmers & Growers and Openfield you very soon start to build up your own farming news source. Most of these organisations use Twitter for breaking news and so the information you receive is unbelievably current, enabling you to stay ahead of the game with farming news and commodity prices. You really to have to try it to understand how valuable it is.

With smart phones with larger screens all of this can be easily read and accessed on the hoof, and with their ability to record and upload videos as well, it is possible to do all the above without sitting in front of a computer.

If after reading this you are still sceptical about the wonderful possibilities that social networking can deliver, in the words of a “yoof” I heard on a debate on the radio the other day, having just been criticised by a gentleman on the panel for indulging in the perceived “banality” of Twitter, he was told by the said yoof to “Get with the now, Grandad!”

To find out more, see me on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/JohnPawseySPF?feature=mhee or on Twitter @hanslope and get with the now!

Blog for National Farmers Union website - October 2011

Herbicide Intolerance

Herbicide Intolerance

I went to a very interesting meeting at the NFU headquarters at Stoneleigh earlier this month to meet some farmers from America representing the Illinois Soybean Association (ISA) to talk to us about their experience with growing genetically modified (GM) herbicide tolerant (HT) soybeans. That’s Roundup Ready soybeans to you and me. 

The organic “movement” has been very vocal about it’s opposition to GM and being an organic farmer attending many organic conferences and meetings, I have heard pretty much all of the arguments about why GM crops are the work the the devil, so I was keen to go to the meeting with an open mind to get a balance to those views.

Most of the meeting was conducted by two hands-on farmers from the Association who I have to say delivered their presentations with openness and honesty. 

We were told that in 2010 93% of soybeans grown in the US were of the HT trait from a base of only just under 10% in 1996, so plainly American farmers adoption of GM soybeans has been nothing short of monumental.

For UK farmers, the ability to spray a single pass of glyphosate on a growing crop to tidy up the ever increasing list of herbicide resistant weeds, saving time and chemical costs has long been a dream, and it is what I have always considered to be the major selling point of HT crops. But, with only a little delving during the meeting and a frank discussion with one of the US farmers in the lunch break, the single spray myth was soon dispelled.

The reality is that many weeds in the US have now become resistant to glyphosate, mainly due to the fact that early adopters of the technology cut application rates of the chemical to save money thus selecting “super-weeds” which reproduced, set seed and spread. To deal with those miscreants “conventional” chemistry now has now been reverted to. 

The herbicide strategy adopted by most soybean growers now revolves around a 3 to 4 spray system. The first spray is with a residual herbicide, the second with paraquat pre-emergence and then a full rate of glyphosate post-emergence. I was told that you had to put your glyphosate on when the weeds got to about 4 inches tall, as any taller than that they become difficult to kill and you may find you have to go back with a second dose.

According to the farmer I spoke to, the biggest advantage of HT crops was that it allowed him to use No-Till techniques which gave him three major advantages. With No-Till there are no seedbed preparations so he makes considerable savings in machinery and fuel costs, helping him to lower his carbon footprint. Secondly, not cultivating the soil can improve the structure of the soil and thirdly, the technique was helping to build up organic matter with all the benefits that it delivers. When he started No-Tilling 30 years ago his organic matter levels were at 1%, they were now 2.5%.

A major complaint was that US chemical companies had rested on their laurels for too long thinking that developing GM crops and glyphosate was the complete way forward. This has meant that research and development into “conventional” herbicides has fallen on to the back burner. Now that glyphosate resistant “super-weeds” were becoming more difficult to control, it was felt that more focus should be put on other herbicides to fill that gap.

If you are able to dismiss the multitude of environmental arguments that are levied against GM crops, the farmer representatives of the Illinois Soybean Association felt that the argument for the environmental benefits of HT soybeans of “reduced labour, savings in diesel fuel, reduced machinery wear, increases in earthworms, organic matter, soil moisture and in soil condition, reductions in soil erosion, improvements to water and air quality” should be the selling point that the peddlers of GM crops should major on to encourage adoption by the doubters.

Interestingly they did not talk much about yield increases. The graphs that we were shown showed an increase in yield of about 2% per year from the mid 1990’s, but from the late 1980’s it looked like about an average of 1% per year. Even though yield in UK crops seems to have flattened over the past few years, conventional UK agriculture could boast a similar performance. 

Having heard the presentations and discussed the ins and outs with the ISA farmers, I found it difficult to understand why any farmer in the UK would want to adopt genetically modified herbicide tolerant crops. There seemed to be very little savings in herbicide costs and no great yield benefit. As far as all the environmental benefits are concerned, most UK farmers now adopt at least Min-Till techniques which address most of the No-Till environmental advantages.

So, why were soybean farmers over here extolling the virtues of a crop that at present we are unable to grow in beloved Blighty?

When I discovered that the other farmers in the room were predominantly involved with large livestock operations the penny dropped. 

Up until the last couple of years the EU has been the largest importer and consumer of soybeans. It is also one of the slowest to authorise the avalanche of new GM varieties that could potentially arrive from over the pond. On average it takes the EU up to 45 months from application to approval of a new GM variety. Apparently we are still questioning the first generation of GM crops while the biotech industry are moving onto the second generation. 

This is enormously frustrating to American farmers as their second biggest market is not playing ball. One slightly feels that it would have been better to ask your customer what they wanted first rather than trying to persuade them what they need after the product has been loaded in the delivery van ready for despatch with all the costs involved. But hey, that’s what we farmers do, stick it in the ground and hope somebody wants it come harvest time.

It is also hugely frustrating to UK livestock farmers, especially ones whose systems require huge amounts of imported protein to grow even more protein, as most of the soybeans out there are GM and are increasingly GM varieties that the EU is still working through the system. This is a supply and demand situation that adds risk and cost to their intensive operations.

The only solace that US farmers can take comfort in is that their new biggest customer is China. Any boat that arrives at Europe's shores that is found to contain a GM material not approved by us can sail full steam ahead to Shanghai where it takes the Chinese approximately 45 minutes for approval. A slight exaggeration maybe.

I know that I might seem like a stuck record (see my previous blog about the Processors and Growers Research Organisation - PGRO), but given the increasing global demand for protein and if we are really serious about food security surely we should be encouraging the government or our levy bodies to invest in more research and development into proteins that can be grown successfully at our latitude. We need to be doing something to stop the decline in the pea and bean acreage and the only way we can do that is to develop higher yielding, higher protein, better disease resistance and more palatable varieties.

UK livestock farmers have to become less reliant in imports and look more to home grown protein to feed their animals or change their system.

Interestingly, the chair at the meeting was Jonathan Tipples from the Home Grown Cereals Authority who was surprisingly enthusiastic about quickening the pace of importing GM soybeans and adopting GM crops in the UK. It might have been more interesting if the NFU had persuaded someone from the PGRO to do the job instead. 

Blog for National Farmers Union website - September 2011

Get On My Land!

Get On My Land!

In 1998 I wrote an article for the Suffolk Preservation Society’s magazine ahead of the Country Landowners Association’s failed attempt to bring more land into voluntary public access under their publicly funded Access 2000, designed to ward of the Right to Roam. The Ramblers’ Association were predictably sceptical about the CLA’s attempts and their assistant director at the time David Beskine was quoted in The Independant as saying, “Access 2000 has been a sham from the outset. It has been running for more than two years and yet the CLA cannot point to a single acre of land where the public has been given new access.”

My article was entitled, “Public Access - A Farmers View” and read as follows:

Farmers are territorial animals and like to stamp their mark on their land, and I’m afraid that I am no exception. When I was eventually given a free whip on our family farm I developed an eagle eye for walkers enjoying their freedom to traverse my new territory. One foot off the footpath and they suffered the full effect of my wrath, “Get Off My Land!” People on horseback were my pet hate and I would watch them from a distance and wait until they strayed. Screaming through the gears of my Land Rover I would arrive scarlet faced, voice trembling with anger and demand that they should, “Rejoin the bridleway immediately!” 

It was beyond my comprehension why a law-abiding citizen would leave his house an innocent man and criminalise himself by straying from a public right of way. 

One Sunday my energetic wife suggested that we might like to walk to the pub at lunchtime via the footpath across my neighbour’s farm. Half way there the footpath suddenly came to an abrupt halt in front of a large field of wheat. There was no footpath sign and no evidence that the path carried on. My wife informed me that the path should go straight across the field and proceeded to walk across the growing crop shouting, “I hope your footpaths are in a better state than this one!”

The next day I bought an Ordinance Survey pathfinder map and discovered where the true public rights of way were on my land and to my horror I found that they were incomplete and poorly signed. The penny dropped.

A February article in the Farmers Weekly entitled “Footpaths: obstruct at your peril” said that “some landowners feel that a public right of way is no more than a conduit for legalised trespass” and this was the attitude I subscribed to before I began to walk my local footpaths. The long and short of it is that a public footpath is just that, a path that the public are entitled to pass along just as a public road is a road that the public are entitled to drive their cars along. The only difference is that although a landowner might struggle to divert a B road that dissects his farm he can divert an awkward footpath, so there really is no excuse.

If the Country Landowners Association are planning to produce a national register of public access sites as part of it’s Access 2000 scheme to persuade the government that the statutory right to roam legislation is unnecessary, we had better make sure that our footpaths and bridleways are open, or our argument is going to sound a little thin.

Needless to say Access 2000 was not a success and even today farmers attitude to public rights of way are arguably no different to those cited in the Farmers Weekly at the time. It is no wonder that walkers groups still get hot under the collar over the attitudes of some landowners.

Before I wrote that 1998 article I had just successfully diverted a cross field path with little or no opposition, and although the operation took two years to complete and cost in the region of £1,500, in the long term the time and money is a small price to pay.

This year I successfully concluded another diversion and a creation with only a single local objection to the diversion. The creation fills in the gap on the St Edmunds Way which I did allow under permissive access, but now it officially a Public Right of Way and runs adjacent to the drive to my house.

The only positive recognition I have had locally for the new footpath is an email from the Chairman of our Parish Council who congratulated me on the new bridge I have put up over a deep ditch, but the surprise came in a letter from the local Ramblers group. It read as follows:

Dear Mr Pawsey

I am the Local Footpath Secretary for the Ramblers Association in this area of West Suffolk.

It seemed appropriate to write to say how much our Association and the Bury St Edmunds Group appreciate the creation of Footpath 12 on your land, which fills a missing link in the St Edmunds Way. This is part of a long distance footpath across Suffolk.

You probably felt like ourselves that it takes a very long time to resolve local objections, such as those affecting changes to Footpath 9 that delayed the creation of Footpath 12.

The new footbridge where the footpath joins the Shimpling Street road C686 is very impressive. We would be grateful if you would pass on our appreciation to your fellow Director when the opportunity allows.

Yours sincerely

Brian Bagnall

Love or hate the Ramblers in my experience they are the people who always stick to the footpaths, don’t bring hordes of dogs to foul the path for other people and have a genuine interest in being in and enjoying the countryside. 

To see from my tractor cab a trial of people appreciating what the great outdoors has to offer come wind, rain or shine brings a warm glow.

Brian Bagnall……...Get on my land!

Blog for National Farmers Union website - August 2011

The Prince and the Porker

I met Prince Charles yesterday.

I am part of a group of East Anglian organic cereal farmers who through Organic Arable (see http://www.organicarable.co.uk/) currently provide 75% of all the organic cereals and pulses to BQP, British Quality Pigs, to feed their porkers, who are then sold through Waitrose under the Duchy Original brand. 

Selling organic combinable crops locally has always been a bit of a challenge and having to haul wheat and beans down to the West Country not only adds lots of food miles, but also costs a lot of money. The BOCM Pauls mill at Burston is roughly 35 miles away from us and it is where BQP have all their organic feedstuffs milled. So it seemed sensible to start talking.

However, finding a local market was not the only aim of the group, we also wanted to address price volatility and try and establish a long term relationship with a buyer.

BQP were looking to address price volatility as well, but they also wanted a more stable supply of local British organic cereals and pulses with guaranteed provenance.

In June 2009 the group met with Alison Johnson, the Technical Development Manager at BQP and started to bash out how a deal could work.

Alison turned out to be a very positive person to deal with and it wasn’t long before we came up with a formula that encompassed all our needs, ensuring that the price we were paid was fair to all.

The component parts of the pricing consists of three equal parts:

1. Our cost of production
2. A market link to the conventional market
3. The retail “meat basket” price

Andrew Trump, the Managing Director of Organic Arable sent spreadsheets around to the group, so that our group cost of production could be worked out, which in turn gave us a useful benchmarking tool. More importantly, this part of the pricing addresses the potential of increasing, or decreasing variable and fixed costs of the group.

We all felt it necessary to link the price to the conventional market but because it only reflects a third of the cost structure it works as a price volatility suppresser.

The “meat basket” price is the retail price that BQP is paid by Waitrose for the whole pig. By including this as a third of the calculation means that if the supermarket drops that price, BQP will pay the group less for our crops, but of course it works the other way as well.

Harvest 2010 has been our first year using our marketing formula and I have to say that although it needs a slight tweak, it has done exactly what it was supposed to to. It has taken the highs and lows out of the market, ensured that we have a local market for all of our combinable crops and BQP have a feed for their pigs which is sourced from local British farmers at a price that we can all afford. Waitrose are happy too because they know that all of their Duchy Original pork has a guaranteed provenance, where the whole supply chain has had a fair deal.

And was Prince Charles happy? Yes he was, and he told us so.


Blog for National Farmers Union website - July 2011

Rogues and Surfers

I have an old wages book in the farm office from 1954 which shows that we had 55 people working on the farm at that time. It’s hard to imagine what the atmosphere was like when my Grandfather instructed his farm Forman in the morning in front of five football teams worth of men, giving them instructions for the day. 

Nowadays we are only three lonely souls, coursing the fields in our modern hermetically sealed tractors, doing the work of eighteen men in more comfort than those in the fifties could have only dreamt of. To overcome the boredom we do still have CB radios in our tractors so that we can pass the time of day with each other or with neighbours if they are similarly equipped, but it can surely be nothing compared to the banter that used to go on with that amount of men on the farm.

Since I have been farming organically there is a time of year when we do have more people on the farm and that time is now; roguing time. Usually we have a team of eight who take a month to rogue the more lightly infested fields of wild oats, docks and thistles, while the more heavily infested fields get cut with our weed surfer. The weed surfer is basically an eight meter wide mower which we dangle over the top of our crops chopping the seed heads off weeds, hopefully before they become viable.

In the case of wild oats, you basically have a week to ten days to cut them after flowering before the seed becomes viable. Unlike wheat, they flower from the top down, so we have tended to go in early to cut those top ones as soon as we can and then go back ten days later to cut the lower ones which now protrude above the crop as then stem continues to grow. You also tend to get the tillers which have grown above the crop by the time you come in again for the second time.

We have been weed surfing for three years now, and although we have not got rid of the oats in our more weedy fields, for the first time this year I think that we are starting to see a drop in their population.

The other weed that the surfer has been good at controlling is charlock. We have had fields with swathes of the stuff, and now the majority of those fields are clean.

It has also been good at dealing with creeping thistle populations as the surfer chops off their flowering heads preventing them from seeding and weakening their rhizomes.

Although I have been very pleased with the results from the weed surfers to date, they are really most useful in fields where it would not be economically viable to rogue them. 

There is no doubt that taking the weeds off the fields by roguing is the best way to make sure that the field remains clean. 

A combination of the two methods is perfect. We get some work to do ourselves in a slack period before harvest, and we also get the friendly banter of our summer visitors. Okay, it’s not three football teams, but it’s nearly a team!

Blog for National Farmers Union website - June 2011

Dry Weather Blues

In 1997 I ran the London Marathon. There were several reasons for running it. Firstly, a great friend of mine had died of cancer a couple of years before and it was a way of raising money cancer charities. Secondly, I had been a long distance runner at school and had always wanted to do a marathon and thirdly, I had accepted the challenge from a friend to run it with him whilst hideously drunk late one Saturday night in November 1996.

So, I committed myself to 6 months training over the ensuing months to prepare myself for the ordeal the following April. Helpfully, 500 acres of the farm is on a former world war two airfield, and so rather than splash my way around heavy clay fields over the winter, I did most of my training on the relative luxury of the hard surface of the old perimeter track.

There was a downside though. All that running on such an unforgiving surface caused me to impact one of my hips one month before the marathon, which mean’t that my training had to be curtailed before the event and I ran the actual race heavily under the influence of ibuprofen.

When this Christmas I nearly hit 14 stone, my thoughts turned to running again and I made a New Year’s resolution to loose 2 stone. However, this time there would be no more training on hard surfaces in case my hip complaint resurfaced. I would old run on the network of farm grass tracks and headlands which should soften the impact on my bones. 

Well, a fat lot of good that has been! Not having had any proper rain since February has mean’t that the whole farm has gone down like a road. I’m just as likely to suffer from a twisted ankle as well as an impacted hip as I daily try and negotiate the fossilised hoof prints that the local hunt have left for me to negotiate.

God only knows how this dry weather is going to impact on our yields. I suppose the only consolation an organic farmer has is that we haven't spent any money on fertiliser and chemicals, but we’ve still prepared the seedbed, sown the seed and been through a couple of times with our harrow comb weeder and inter-row hoe.

I thought it only prudent to adjust my expected yields down by 20% to see what happens to our cash flow for this winter, but it we don’t get rain in the next two weeks, I might be revisiting those figures with further reductions.

However, there’s no point in worrying about something that you can’t do anything about…..

I woke up this mornin’

The sun was in the sky

It hadn’t rain for weeks

The ground was awful dry

I got the Dry Weather Blues

D R Y Dry Weather Blues

It’s definitely getting to me.

PS I’m now 11 stone 7 pounds!

Blog for National Farmers Union website - May 2011

PGRO is Getting Rusty

It was with trepidation that I walked my crops this morning after a week of days with daytime temperatures rising consistently over twenty degrees centigrade, preceded by heavy overnight dews. I had half expected to see rusts rampaging through my crops with gay abandon, but it was with great relief that I found very little disease. It’s probably been hot enough to arrest some yellow rust development, but we are clearly not out of the woods yet.

Possibly the biggest worry is the potential for brown rust in beans. A few years ago it swept through our bean crops reducing their yield dramatically almost to the extent that I considered mowing the crop rather than harvesting it. Even my conventional neighbours seemed to struggle with getting on top of the disease. I would suggest that that year brown rust cost the UK bean farmers a considerable amount of money.

It is then surprising that the Processors and Growers Research Organisation (PGRO) do not even score bean varieties for brown rust. Their 2011 Pulse Agronomy Guide simply says “all varieties are susceptible”, and thats that. It then says, “Fungicides such as tebuconazole, cyproconazole, azoxystrobin, metconazole and boscalid + pyraclostrobin may improve yield in either winter or spring beans, but treatment is unlikely to be worthwhile if infection begins when pod fill is complete and the crop is beginning to senesce.” Well, thats a fat lot of good for an organic farmer and next to useless for a conventional one.

It seems to me that we need much more research and development into field bean varieties than what we have at the moment, with some robust disease resistance. At present we only have five winter bean varieties to choose from on the PGRO recommended list, bred by 3 breeders. Not a lot of choice from not a lot of breeders.

In a time when the world’s demand for protein continues to follow an ever increasing upwards trend, I am continually amazed why we do not put more importance on the most popular protein crop grown by British farmers. Beans are what we can grow well, but we still dabble in alternative protein crops, diverting important R&D money into lupins and the like, instead of improving on what we grow best. It’s all bonkers.

When the wheels fall of a tight wheat rape rotation and farmers are struggling to find an alternative break, PGRO will be ill equipped to provide it’s levy paying farmers with an alternative unless they pull their finger out now.

It’s time to wake up and join in the old refrain,

“Beans, beans are good for your heart,

The more you eat the more you………”

Apologies, but it’s currently a popular rhyme with my seven year old. I obviously had nothing to do with teaching her such puerile lavatorial humour.

Blog for National Farmers Union website - April 2011

NEWS FLASH: Hoe Action on Suffolk Farm

I know that it’s not a very environmentally friendly thing to wish for, but I’ve been itching to get out there and burn some red diesel.

It has been torturous watching all my neighbours spraying and putting on fertiliser over the last few weeks, when it has still been too wet for us to get on with some hoeing. But at last the ground is dry enough and this week we started with a vengeance. 

All our cereals and beans are drilled on twenty five centimeter rows, and we inter-row hoe everything at least once with our Garford hoe with Robocrop guidance. Basically it’s a steerage hoe but without the bloke on the back grappling with an old iron steering wheel desperately trying to avoid hoeing out the crop rather than the intended weeds. No, our hoe has a camera mounted on the frame which picks out the rows of crop, and in an instant reports to a complex set of hydraulics which keep it in-between the rows leaving the wheat untouched. With our RTK guided tractor, you are able to spend most of your working hours facing backwards to see the system making continuous fine adjustments, ensuring accuracy at all times.

Our other form of mechanical weeder is the good old harrow-comb. To be honest it’s pretty useless for getting any weeds out that I worry about, but at this time of year when the cereals are tillering, loosening a little bit of soil around the plant does mineralise a bit of nitrogen. It all helps at a time of year when our organic wheats look pale in comparison to all my neighbours lush green freshly fed fields.

Ideally, we like to hoe the fields first and then go through them a few days later with the harrow-comb. The harrow-comb can help stop hoed weeds from re-rooting by knocking them about again, and can dislodge any weeds that were not quite up-rooted with the hoe.

Some of our fields are coming back into their fertility building phase this autumn, and so the last pass with the harrow-comb will also under-sow red clover. Under-sowing is always a tricky thing to judge. You don’t want to go too late as the soil can get too dry for the clover to germinate and the crop canopy can be too developed and can smother the small clover plants. You also don’t want to go too early as red clover can be very competitive and can swamp the crop to be harvested. This reduces yield and makes combining very difficult. So, at the moment I have no idea when sowing will happen, but it will be some time just before I think that the crop is too big to harrow and the ground is damp and friable enough to get some soil around the clover seed.

There is no doubt that weed free fields, it that’s want you’re into, are best achieved with a chemical bottle; but it all comes at a cost which you have little control over. Although I am unable to control the cost of red diesel, my variable costs are a given year on year, which not only helps cash flow, but takes a bit of risk out of the game. 

You’ll all be doing it soon!

Blog for National Farmers Union website - March 2011

Gather your nuts while you may

With organic wheat prices at around £280 per tonne and talk of organic dairy businesses unable to make a profit if prices are above £250, it is tempting to argue that to support the industry, we cereal farmers should be selling to dairy farmers at a price where they can make a profit. It is an argument that is debated within organic circles regularly, often with some sympathy from the cereal sector. 

Since I have been farming organically, we have seen the feed wheat price at £145 per tonne and up to the highs and beyond what we are experiencing today, but never has there been a time when it is suggested that these levels of commodity prices are here for more than a number of months, until now.

The last time a grain store was build on this farm was by my grandfather in 1964. Luckily he was a man with great foresight, and against all advice he built a 3000 tonne, single span, asbestos clad, steel girded monster for a farm that then probably only produced 1500 tonnes of cereals in any one year. Even though my crop assurance inspector tells me that our store is better than most, I know that at some point soon I am going to have to make some sticky financial decisions on how we store our grain. 

So back to the organic dairy sector and cereal prices. The argument that we cereal farmers should take a knock on the price we could get in the market so that the dairy sector can make a living is plainly ridiculous. I don’t hear any East Anglian conventional cereal farmers out there saying, “Hold on lads, lets give these poor old livestock farmers a break and sell at £120 per tonne,” when the market is hovering around £200, so why should we? Equally, diary farmers selling at a loss is absurd, but it is the consumer who is going to have to pay for the increase in higher wheat prices in a fairer price for milk. 

The price rise will have to be greater in the conventional market as the organic wheat market has only risen 55% during this marketing year while the conventional market has risen over 120%.

It’s high time that we all valued food more. None of us go into the photographers and say, “I’ll have the cheapest camera you’ve got.” We buy the best one we can afford.

As for my grain store; if for the first time since I have been farming I am allowed to make a profit big enough so that I can invest in some of the large capital items that have had to have been ignored for the last 20 years, I certainly won’t feel guilty about that.

And as a final warning to those with antiquated stores. At a grain management workshop I attended recently, the speaker spent some time listing the creatures that can infest our stores if conditions allowed. Nearing the end of his terrifying roll of beasties, he showed a picture of a particularly nasty weevil with a long weevily snout. “And this one,” he said, “this one you can find on your nuts.” Now, you wouldn’t want that, would you.

Blog for National Farmers Union website - February 2011

They Didn't Teach Me That at College

I’ve just returned from the Organic Research Centre’s annual 2 day conference held near to my old Alma Mater, The Royal Agricultural College near Cirencester. It is a conference that I try to go to as it is always held in January, and at that time of year I usually have time for re-evaluation and consideration, and the conference is a great forum for new ideas and solutions.

Being so near to my former college where I learn’t about how to farm conventionally, I started to think about some of the questions that I have had to answer since I started farming organically that I had not been taught in the early 1980‘s.

Building fertility is possibly the biggest challenge to any stockless organic system. There are a myriad of nitrogen fixing plants to choose from out there, but which one will do best on your soil type? Should it be in the ground for 18 weeks or 18 months to provide the most fertility? Can it be under sown in a cereal crop or is it too competitive and will swamp your crop before harvest? How much nitrogen does it actually fix and how much is available to the following crop? How many following crops will that fertility ley support?

Phosphate is another worry. Like your Triple Super Phosphate, our Rock Phosphate comes from Morocco, but unlike yours, most of our phosphate is not available to the plant in the short term. So, what plants can you use as a green manure that make that applied phosphate or the unavailable phosphate that is in our East Anglian soils available? Do different varieties of wheat manage to make available more of the existing phosphate in our soils?  

As far as my college lecturers were concerned, weed control came out of a bottle, so having been used to jumping onto a sprayer to deal with a problem, keeping my farm rid of the nasties was another head scratcher. Having a proper rotation and drilling a bit later does help with some weeds, but the market around here is for wheat, barley and beans and you can’t leave autumn drilling too late on our heavy clay soil. I have invested a huge amount of time and money into novel forms of mechanical weed control and now all our crops are sown on wide spacings and are hoed with a laser guided hoe, which is drawn by a tractor with RTK guidance. For the last two years we have been working with a company to develop a mower that will cut the heads of wild oats and other competitive weeds before they seed in a standing crop.

So, there are solutions out there, but in the main the organic farmer has to solve many of the problems him/herself, as funding for research into organic farming systems is almost non existent. I remember coming out of lectures at The Royal Agricultural College weighed down with government funded research booklets on how to increase productivity using artificial fertilisers and pesticides. I often wonder what state our industry would be in today if the same amount of money had been invested in organic farming? They certainly wouldn’t have dumped all that sewage sludge in the North Sea.

Blog for National Farmers Union website - January 2011

The Axe of Decontrol

Having a muck out in the farm office is not something I look forward to. It is usually spurred on by recognition that the piles of papers on my desk are not only teetering, threatening daily collapse, but more importantly, may contain a frightening bit of DEFRA legislation that has been hiding in there for months with a due date looming large. However on this occasion the office cleansing was prompted by both printers breaking in one day. The oldest printer began to spit small metal cogs out with every page printed whilst the newer one was broken by me slamming the lid down having replaced the ink cartridges for the second time that week due to my children's occupation of printing out full colour pictures of their favourite fluffy animal of the day. 

So, two new printers arrived and space had to be made for the beasts, which involved desk tidying. Desk tidying inevitably involves a certain amount of filing, which in turn requires an amount of going through old files to make space for the new files. These all have to live in a filing cabinet that is so full that when the top draw is fully drawn out the whole thing lurches forward, momentarily threatening to chop your toes off. Note to self; buy steel capped boots for filing.

It was during the file cleansing operation that I came across an old Punch cartoon that I had saved when I had gone through my Grandfather’s desk when he died. The cartoon is dated June 15th 1921. The scene is of a farmer standing in a small copse. Having just taken off his jacket and hat, he is rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and is holding a large axe. There are three trees behind him all containing a legend. The first tree says “Guaranteed Price of Wheat” and the second tree says “State Control of Cultivation”, while the third tree, the tree that the farmer is squaring up to says, “Agricultural Wages Board”. Mr Punch, smartly dressed in a suit and trilby hat, has one hand protectively against the third tree and is pointing at the legend with his cane. Mr Punch is saying to the farmer “I’m all for the free use of that weapon of yours: but I should spare this tree. It’s worth keeping”. The cartoon is entitled “The Axe of Decontrol”.

Who knows why my grandfather kept the cartoon. Maybe he thought it was amusing?

Blog for the National Farmers Union - Originally published 15th December 2010

Welcome to Organic Farming - Suffolk Stockless Style

As this is my first blog for the NFU I thought it only fair to tell you a little bit about myself so that you can qualify any outlandish statements that might come from my two itchy typing fingers over the next 12 months. 

For example, any comments I might make about livestock farming can be taken with a pinch of salt, because I haven’t got any animals. “No Livestock on an organic farm?” I hear you cry, “surely with no muck, your whole system has to be based on mystery”. On many of the farm walks we have held, some might have arrived with that misconception, but hopefully by the time they have left the farm, they will have seen that we tackle stockless organics with a comparatively conventional and straightforward approach. 

As I no longer follow the traditional ‘East Anglian Cereal Barron’ three course rotation of winter wheat, winter wheat, winter cruise, any claims on my part about being able to compete with the likes of our own Barley Barron NFU President on his latest holiday on Queen Mary 2 amongst the Caribbean Islands, should be treated as unlikely as continuous cereal cropping on this farm. I favour a fertility building rotation which includes clovers, green manures, compost spreading and other nutrient building activities that you’ll all be doing when the oil runs out.

However, the reality is that like you, I am trying to make a living out of the business of farming, listening to my customers needs and providing them with a product that meets their requirements within the realms of good agricultural husbandry. I believe that conventional and organic (or should that be unconventional) farmers have a huge amount in common and an awful lot to learn from each other. There is no “I’m right and you’re wrong”. 

And the little bit about myself? I farm 700 hectares in Suffolk with a further 300 hectares under farm management contracts, all farmed organically, with 2 full time staff and 3 tractors. I’m married with 3 children, balding and play the bass guitar badly.

Blog for for the National Farmers Union - Originally published on 22nd November 2010