There are few English farmers who will not by now have heard about the government’s brutal and abrupt halting of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) (extended offer) 2024 version at around 6pm on Tuesday 11th March 2025. Now it is time to try to explain to everyone else the consequences of this decision.
Background
Shortly after the 2024 autumn budget, DEFRA announced that the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), the legacy scheme from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), would be drastically and prematurely reduced to a stump during 2025. BPS enabled UK (and other EU farmers) to produce food at far below the true cost of production for very many years.
After Brexit, the government of the day promised a land of milk and honey, proposing the use of public money to pay for public goods, through the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMS), this would be made up of various strands, which would evolve as we progressed through the great Agricultural Transition. BPS was given a withdrawal trajectory, was planned to finally expire in 2028, and farmers were promised that during this time a new range of environmentally focussed schemes would develop and be rolled out as BPS declined, the central feature being the SFI. This turned out to be optimistic to put it kindly. The NFU had to repeatedly request an extension to BPS withdrawal as we saw endless delays in SFI rollout, but this fell on deaf (Tory) ears. SFI appeared first as a pilot in 2022, available to a limited number of farmers, then as a fully functioning scheme in 2023, fully compatible with the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) control system, though only featuring a limited number of options to apply for. All well and good, it worked, it paid out quarterly and quite a few farmers engaged with it.
Fast forward to late 2024, the SFI 24 extended offer appeared, with over 100 options to choose from, wildly complicated to apply for it turned out, some of the new options conflict with options in the SFI 23 scheme, and have to be removed by the RPA from their system before you can progress with an SFI 24 application. In our own case this has delayed completion of our own application for the 2024 offer.
Then we had the budget, BPS was decapitated, which created a rumble of upset and worry throughout English farming, renowned Cumbrian shepherd and author James Rebanks said he believed that the progressive greener dream for UK farming had died. I have tried hard not to agree with him, but am now very depressed by having to admit that I do.
As we have heard, on Tuesday, Defra announced the sudden closure of the SFI 24 extended offer. To withdraw what was originally described as a rolling application scheme, ie you can apply at any time in the year, within 5 months of the sudden decapitation of the Basic payment scheme, is heart-stoppingly shocking, and desperately sad. The likely consequences are truly scary. There was no warning, or any hint that we should get a shift on with applications, one moment the scheme was open ended, then suddenly it was cut off, this action has further shattered what little remained of the trust of those farmers who are trying to provide food for the nation, in a more sustainable way than ever before, and at the same time trying to run profitable businesses. Very sadly it can only demonstrate what a shallow understanding the government has of how food is produced in the UK.
We had been fooled into believing that SFI would expand as BPS declined, at the same time encouraging us to produce food in less damaging ways. Many farmers have committed a great deal of energy to new ways of farming, using countryside stewardship (CS) and SFI as a backstop whilst they explore new ways of growing food in a less damaging fashion than before. This is a terrible betrayal of farmers who are bold enough to try to do the right thing.
It is incredibly difficult to wean yourself off the high nitrogen/pesticide/intensification treadmill, and without the support of schemes like SFI it will never happen, so the damage to soil, water and environment will continue.
In our own case, we have a new application for SFI 24 waiting for us to press the button, sitting on the RPA system, whilst we check and recheck that the huge commitment it represents, on top of the schemes we already committed to over the last 15 years, is achievable. Our application has been held up while the RPA made adjustments to many of our fields due to rotational offers from the SFI 23 scheme which conflict with the SFI 24 scheme. Eg: the no insecticide option (IPM4) cannot run alongside the low input cereal option (AHW10) in the newest iteration of the scheme, on the same piece of land. Arguably the whole thing is too complicated, but we are learning to work with it. Now it is gone before it had barely begun, and will be replaced by something else, but not until 2026 we are told. DEFRA has suddenly pulled the plug, with no warning, or deadline or reasonable explanation. We will actually be worse off than we were last year.
SFI options such as no insecticide, low input cereals, companion cropping, bird food, cover crops and many others, which are all aimed at giving farmers the confidence to farm in a less damaging fashion, have now disappeared for new entrants, and they are left with little option but to remain in or return to the high input systems that have been proven to be so damaging to soil, water and climate. It is such a short sighted move, destroying trust, and entrenching the old fashioned view that “this is how we’ve always done it and I’m not changing now”.
Farmers take a long time to make changes to their systems, and there are a great many who haven’t engaged at all with CS or SFI yet, one can understand their hesitancy when you see huge seemingly arbitrary decisions like this made in an instant. Trust has been shredded. Those farmers really are going to be in the financial mire now, and there is absolutely not a hope of dragging them into the modern world where we take care not to pollute, to enhance the environment, to improve soils etc etc, whereas previously SFI was going to do that, eventually. There is clearly not a shred of understanding in government of what is going on in the countryside.
Many farmers have dipped their toes into Countryside Stewardship on its 5 year timescale, and will have been waiting for their agreements to expire before then moving wholesale into SFI. What are they supposed to do now? This a very sad continuation of the destructive outcomes of past decades of ag policy. The last government put a lot of effort into building something that would last, would wean us off flat rate area subsidies, and direct public money into public goods. SFI 23 worked remarkably well, maybe they over extended their ambition a bit with the extended offer for SFI 24, but to drop it completely when so many are still putting applications together defies all common sense, will destroy trust and create huge cynicism and suspicion.
The decapitation of BPS last autumn was bad enough, and SFI was supposed to be the safety net to help us through that. To then destroy that safety net is a betrayal of monstrous proportions. That the government fails to understand anything about farming is terrifyingly exposed by this move, what is their true desired direction of travel for food, nature and climate? All the things they have said to us, from Starmer “having our backs covered” to DEFRA secretary Steve Reed’s speech at NFU conference ring utterly hollow now.
A close look at these calves’ tag numbers gives away the fact that these are not in fact twins, however much you want to believe that they are. It is remarkable how the coloured eye rings have passed down through the generations from the six heifer calves that we bought from the Booth family in Dewlish a dozen years or more ago, the originals where black, but our red bulls have for the last two years been injecting a little more colour into the herd, after many years of black Angus breeding. This heifer mother is herself one of the first progeny of Theo our red Hereford bull, bought in 2022, hence her red coat and white face, then she was run with Mr Red our red Angus bull last summer, to calve herself at two years of age, a few weeks ago.
Here is Theo, enjoying the attention of a school visit on a fresh sunny morning in February. He loves having his head and neck rubbed, but you wouldn’t want to be the same side of the fence as him, he is too big and strong to trust.
The heifers finished calving about 10 days ago, and this week the rest of the cows have started. It makes life simpler to deal with the first timers before the rest start to drop their precious loads, in case they need extra attention.
The bird food plots are still standing remarkably well after a whole winter’s weather, although you have to search hard to find many seeds left. We have found we get much better results if we sow bird food plots on new ground every year though this makes crop planning tricky in the rest of the field. The bird food plots need to be sown in May or June, and must be left in place until at least mid February, meaning that they can only sown in fields destined for spring crops and have to be followed by a spring crop too, which is difficult because approximately 40% of the farm is sown in spring, and 60% sown to winter crops. Hence the fact that all too often they are sown in the same place year after year, but the ground then gets weedier and weedier. It is hard to control the weeds because the seed mixture is diverse, with several different species. Most weedkillers are specific, so will kill at least some of the mixture. A stale seedbed and clean ground is the best way to success, and so the debate goes on, round and round and round.
A project is underway to survey the river Stour along the stretch covered by our Cluster group, roughly Hinton St Mary to Blandford. Funding has been obtained for this work, which we have been keen to use, it will involve a walk-over survey by not for profit organisation For Love of Water (FLOW). They will assemble the data they collect into an interactive map, and in addition to that we are adding drone pictures of the river, which can be stitched together to form a continuous ribbon and can be then embedded in the digital map.
Along the way we are collecting interesting pictures as seen above, which shows Bryanston church, with the big house in the background (Now Bryanston School) formerly the seat of the Portman family, until 1928. The Stable block can been nestling in the trees.
The magnificent breadth of the Stour valley, from Shillingstone looking south east towards Stourpaine in the distance, with Hanford School and the Hanford Farms Dairy in the centre.
So many bends and so many trees. It’s hard to believe we managed to paddle this 10 years ago, the river is very overgrown in many places now. From Stur to Blandford felt like double the distance it is by road. What would a beaver do?
The delightful view of an active building site, Bryanston Holt taking shape on what was formerly part of Lower Bryanston Farm, on the outskirts of Blandford.
A lovely picture of a Kestrel, by our expert long shot Mr Wicks, looking far too beguiling to be the same species as the murderous beast caught at lower res by a less skilled operator, tearing a dead rat to shreds in the farm yard.
For nerds and engineers who may be interested, we have been overhauling the main top conveyor in our grain store. It was manufactured by Braintree company Carier, for those who like to know these things, and was installed in 1980. Apart from a few running repairs it has served us very well, moving countless thousands of tons of grain since then. It is a flow and return model, meaning that it carries wet grain on its upper level from the holding bins to the drier, which must be kept full at all times to stop the hot air escaping, and the surplus (overflow) is carried back to the bins on the lower level. The conveyor is in simplicity a long metal box, with 2 levels, approximately 60 feet long. It contains a continuous chain with flights, driven by an electric motor connected to a reduction gearbox by rubber belts. At the far end, the chain runs around an idler sprocket. You can see how worn the old sprockets were in the picture. The combination of this wear and the wear of the chain itself had resulted in a dreadful noise which developed during last harvest, as chain and sprocket were not disengaging properly. There was also what looked like an bend in the drive shaft, making the gearbox wobble menacingly. In the past we have called on professionals to do this kind of job, but with many years’ experience of fixing this kind of kit, are we not professionals ourselves, who should be more than adequately equipped to deal with it?
The first major problem facing us was that the business end of the conveyor stuck out into space beyond the end of the existing service catwalk, where it was impossible to work on safely. Equally hazardous, the idler end was high in the roof such that you could only reach it by perching on the sloping top of the drier, only 2 feet away from a thirty foot vertical drop. So job number one was to get Drew in to construct safe extensions to both ends. This took some head scratching, but in the end he devised a metal framework hung from the roof, similar to the original (but too short) upper platform, to which he then fixed timber beams, and finally some sturdy floorboards. Scaffolding and several temporary beams enabled safe installation of these extensions, and then we were able to safely attack the conveyor. Another in a long line of Drew triumphs. It feels like Christmas every time I go up there.
On dismantling it became clear that we would need new chain and sprockets, and obtaining these for a machine built 40 years ago, by a company that went bust more than 20 years ago, might prove tricky. We looked at replacing the whole conveyor, but £20,000 seemed a bit steep, when the body of the machine, and indeed the motor, gearbox and shafts, were still in pretty good fettle. Well Mr Google played his part and we found a specialist who could supply all the parts, it would take 8 weeks, and the new sprockets would arrive as blanks, ie the hole in the middle would have to be machined out to suit the exact size of the shafts in our machine. Fortunately the clever lads at Dorset Tractors know just the fellow, an artist with a lathe and all the other kit to turn a lump of steel into something useful. A 3D printer just wasn’t going to cut the mustard on this occasion.
After a week or two, the sprockets arrived back, shiny and ready for installation. Carrying 110 foot of chain in 10 foot sections up three flights of stairs was a little tedious, but laying it out and joining the sections together was almost exciting. Fitting the gearbox back to the shaft properly, with the bushes and key in the right places, and new bearings throughout, resulted in it running sweet as a nut, before we then fitted new belts and pressed the button….. It works, and runs beautifully, quiet and with hardly any clonking at all.
Old meets new chain, the old pulls the new into place section by sectionNearly ready to push the button
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Whilst clearing out the farm office for a well deserved re-decoration, Will found an ancient can of Malthouse bitter lurking at the back of a cupboard, dated 1990 on the bottom of the can. No one else fancied it, but I thought I’d have a go, it was still very fizzy, and surprisingly clear after 35 years, but suddenly lost my enthusiasm when I saw the sediment that dribbled out into the glass.
Remember these?
Our farm workshop roof, from the top of the scaff tower, in place so our Sparky Tim could safely install some lovely bright new LED light fittings. We can now see right into the back of the shelves when searching for essential spare parts……
The elevated vantage point, aided by the new lights, also gave us an embarrassing view of the top of the shelves. What a mess. The boys have their eyes on this disgrace, keen to sort the treasure from the junk, I’m holding my breath.
For those with an interest in how politics affects farming, I have written a separate post about this week’s bombshell news of the government’s sudden and unexpected removal of the 2024 Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme. SFI has become the centrepiece of support to farmers in England to encourage them to farm in a more sustainable fashion. This action by Defra is likely to be quite consequential, as you will find if you click the link. Safety warning: it is possible I should have left a little more time and space before writing about it………
Comments on the proposals for Inheritance tax in the Budget, October 2024
We can’t ignore the huge coverage farming has been getting in the media recently. Sadly much of the focus on inheritance tax is I believe a red herring, and far more important issues are being masked by it. I am a huge supporter of the NFU but on this occasion I believe the “Stop the family farm tax” approach is a mistake, and worse still they risk being led on by people and organisations who should only be dined with using a very long spoon.
I am concerned that protests such as the ones in London risk farmers’ previously very high approval rating with the public, second only to nurses. It is essential that MPs need to be lobbied in order to make sure they understand the likely consequences of the budget proposals, and we continue to do so, such as at a meeting Dorset NFU officers had with Lloyd Hatton, new MP for south Dorset, who gave us a very fair hearing across this and the many other issues which have profound consequences for food production in the UK. Unfortunately he is not working in the Treasury or No 10.
The NFU and farming as a whole might better be focused on the following:
The very sudden slashing by the government of the remaining 3 years of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS). When the original tapered reduction was first imposed following Brexit, farmers were promised that the new Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS) would go a long way to replace the loss of BPS, formerly a payment to enable us to produce food below the cost of production. ELMS would reward us instead with public money for public goods, such as environmental work. The programme has been very slow to develop, and recently we have even seen parts of it being “paused”. We face a yawning gap. Scottish, Welsh and EU farmers continue to receive full BPS cash. How are English farmers supposed to compete?
The unlevel playing field we have to operate on. The last government signed very generous trade deals with Australia and New Zealand which gave away huge advantages to those who wish to compete in our markets for food, yet the food they produce uses methods and inputs that were long ago banned in the UK. This is simply a continuation of sickeningly familiar policies which have ever more tightly hobbled UK farmers for years, compared to those who export food into the UK. 2 examples: a) Tighter and tighter regulation of the pig industry over recent decades has steadily driven more and more UK pig farmers out of production, while supermarkets shamelessly continue to import cheaper cuts from abroad produced in ways not allowed here. b) The ban on neonicotinoid insecticides 10 years ago has reduced our rapeseed production from a self sufficient 2 million tons per year, to around 700,000 tons this year, so we are having to import 1.3 million tons to meet demand. Where is this coming from? Countries like Canada, Australia and Ukraine, where no such ban exists and no-one cares that the “bee killing pesticide” is used. We are importing this stuff, and exporting our environmental responsibility. Where is any moral lead on this?
The pressures on land from numerous directions: From the purchase of land for inheritance tax (IHT) avoidance, house and road building, business and shopping parks, wind farms, solar parks, pony paddocks, fancy gardens, and most recently modern scourges such as Nutrient Neutrality (see my previous coverage of this here), There are also other pollution offsetting schemes and water company shenanigans, net zero, biodiversity net gain, rewilding etc, all placing greater demands on land. For this reason it is very unlikely we will see a fall in the price of land, and where land is still farmed for food, it has to be farmed ever harder to make the sums add up. This has huge consequences for the environment, wildlife, soil and water quality, and is likely to result in the production of poorer quality food.
The promised Carbon Border Adjustment, which will add a tax to imported products deemed high in associated carbon emissions. Eg: artificial fertiliser. Like it or not fertiliser is a very cost effective way of producing more food from the same area. The government has decided to impose this tax, which is estimated will add around £50 per ton of fertiliser. This will obviously increase our cost of production, and the very likely outcome will be similar to the above. Foreign producers of foods grown with untaxed fertiliser (most foods are grown with fertliser) will yet again have an advantage over our home growers. Same old story.
The Budget in brief:
The government’s budget announced on October 30th, amongst many other things, contained a number of items that will have a considerable effect on landowners, owners of family businesses, and farmers across the UK. The sad thing is, the proposals in the budget that I cover here will not begin to raise the sums required to solve the country’s problems. The items that will affect farmers include the following:
Reduction of business property relief (BPR) previously a 100% exemption of business assets liable to inheritance tax (IHT) held by an individual wishing to leave such assets to their successors on death. Now reduced to 50% relief after full exemption for the first £1 million.
Agricultural property relief (APR), previously a 100% exemption from IHT for land passed to the next generation, now seeing a reduction in the same way as BPR, to 50% of the value of land held by an individual wishing to pass it on, with exemption for the first £1 million. APR and BPR together limited to £1m exemption.
Changes to pension treatment such that any unused pension on death which previously could be passed on outside of tax, will now be subject to IHT.
Changes to national insurance which will raise the cost of employment particularly for businesses with larger workforces.
Drastic shortening of the tailing off of the Basic Payment scheme (BPS), as mentioned at the top, and a pause to the processing and paying out of claims for capital works, which covers anything from tree planting, hedging and fencing, to slurry stores, silage clamps and dry stone walls, all of which are being funded under an increasingly complicated suite of schemes under the environmental land management schemes banner (ELMS). There are now rumours of worse cuts to come. Is it any wonder farmers have been getting agitated?
What are the changes to IHT supposed to achieve?
The proposed IHT changes relating to land, coming from a Labour government, one might have imagined would be aimed mainly at the ultra-wealthy, who have steadily driven up the price of farmland, as they have for decades sunk their wealth in a hitherto tax-free environment in relation to IHT. Sad to say the proposals as they stand comprehensively fail to address this. Farmland will still sit in an effective 20% band, far friendlier to wealth preservation than full fat IHT at the 40% which apply to any other kind of assets. Perhaps worthwhile to note here that BPR was first brought in in 1973, APR in 1984, at 50% exemption, and finally moved to 100% under John Major in 1993, since when the increase in the value of land has greatly outstripped most other investments
The rising value of land has wide repercussions across the whole of food production, ever higher prices achieved at land sales have driven rents ever upwards, landowners and their agents expect the rent, or returns from farming, to somehow reflect the value of the land. Claims that the proposed changes will reduce the price of land are for the birds.
The £1 million exemption is set so low that it will draw far more relatively small farming and other types of businesses into IHT than it needs to, hence the huge reaction from so many farmers. Many farms, especially smaller ones, function on very tight margins, a huge number of which don’t begin to provide a return to match the theoretical value of the land, which has inflated over the decades completely out of the control of its owners, due to the pressures related above in paragraph 3
The proposed changes send a confusing message to business owners, they make absolutely no sense up against Labour’s endless proclamations of growth growth growth for one moment. You won’t get growth if you de-incentivise the entrepreneurial and risk-taking sector in such a way. Who would start up a new business in such a climate?
Some will celebrate the proposals; why should the children of those fortunate enough to own hugely valuable assets like land be able to inherit them tax free ? I would ask them to look a little closer and ask who would they want to be responsible for producing their food; a larger number of highly motivated individual family run businesses, or a tiny number of huge (probably corporate) landowners, who would be the only ones who could possibly afford to buy land in the future?
Many business owners will for the first time face IHT at scale with the loss of much of Business Property Relief, and broadening the campaign would draw so many more family business owners in, we should be working with family businesses across all industries, not just our own. We need to tread with care though, a modest tweaking of the exemption thresholds, to say £5 million, and a fairer treatment of say the over 75s to give time to sort their affairs, would take the wind out of the APR protests, but all the other problems would still remain. Hence the urgent need to adjust the focus of the argument sooner rather than later.
Let’s be honest, anything can happen, and none of us know what the result will be. Haven’t we seen that play out rather well since that infamous vote in 2016? Maybe we can reassure ourselves that there may at least be a little bit of new of money available to invest in our threadbare country. Whether a government like this is capable of using that money wisely is, I admit, another question entirely.
Many farmers have been heavily invested in environment schemes for decades. With the faster removal of BPS, and other signals, we now fear that it will be impossible to sufficiently make up what we lose through BPS with ELM schemes. For many farmers, the only option will be to drive the land ever harder, risking driving a coach and horses through the government’s claimed environmental ambitions. We have seen absolutely no hint that the government has any well thought out plan for the future of food production and security, or how to service their commitments to the environment. Cumbrian shepherd and author James Rebanks has written very intelligentlyhere about the current mood, he is even more gloomy than I, believing that the progressive greener dream for UK farming has died.
James has become an icon for the environmentally inclined farmer, with his eloquent writing and broadcasting, but being a hill farmer really is at the sharp end of the massive betrayal that is underway. There are far fewer options for hill farmers to engage with any of the ELM schemes in order to try to compensate for the loss of BPS, than there are for lowland farmers.
For more of James’ output, a more recent article, on the future of UK food production can be found here: https://unherd.com/2024/12/a-food-apocalypse-is-coming/. For a much longer read see his books The Shepherds Life, and English Pastoral.
While we are on the links, here is one more interesting piece, by a tax specialist, who has given more thought than many to the IHT issues, and his arguments about how many people will be badly affected by the proposals are well worth exploring. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/11/24/how-to-stop-iht-avoidance-but-protect-farmers/
OK can we see a way through this?
Government
Solution 1: If farmers were allowed to operate on a fairer playing field we could all be increasing production, employing more people, paying more income tax and national insurance, trading locally and internationally, stimulating the rural economy, and becoming less reliant on public money.
Solution 2: A more effective way in which the government could use APR reliefs would be to use them to persuade more landowners to let out more land, and on longer terms. There is a dire shortage of land available to rent. For example 100% relief for minimum 20 year lets, 50% for 10 years etc. Sadly so far the NFU and the TFA (tenant farmers association) have failed to persuade Ms Reeves of the value of even this.
Solution 3: Tweak the exemption levels, and convince us you are only going after the ultra wealthy. You know darn well the amounts you will raise from smaller landowners will be tiny.
NFU
Priority 1: Find a new slogan and approach to clearly embrace all the issues facing us, not just APR.
Priority 2: Hammer on the doors of the Treasury until the chancellor agrees to meet and get her to explain to us what she is trying to achieve and why she thinks any of her ideas will work. (She has to date refused to meet the NFU).
Priority 3: Remain positive, tell the whole story over and over and over, with passion, eloquence and authority.
Confession – new drone, couldn’t find old one lost in forest.
Here we see the Stour valley accommodating the excessive autumn rainfall for a third time already this season, this view just east of Durweston, with Manor France farm left of centre, and Blandford in the distance. This flood resulted from the combined effect of 95mm of rain in the previous 48 hours, on top of the melting 3 inches of snow that had fallen two days earlier.
This had followed a lovely dry period mid November, a welcome respite from the relentless downfalls of the previous two months. The drier period had allowed us to return our animals to the meadows, there being plenty of grass still left to eat before winter. The 91 year old early warning system lit up on the Saturday morning, so Fred and Rosie moved the cattle up onto higher ground behind Knighton House, and Jayne and I rounded up our lambs that have been free ranging the meadows for many weeks. We then sat and watched with Father as the water rose before our eyes, over the next two hours the land across which we had just walked the lambs became completely submerged. A bit close for comfort, the animals can’t be trusted not to get themselves marooned on the last bit of dry land, and sheep in particular will not voluntarily put a foot in the water. Sheep floating downstream into Blandford not a good outcome.
A pic from July 2012 shows that if they can be persuaded, cattle will give a good show of actually enjoying it, admittedly the water was a lot warmer on that occasion.
Please note the oak tree with sunshine on it in the middle of the arable field below the water in the top picture, when Storm Darragh blew through a few couple of weeks ago, it caused plenty of trouble.
We were in Devon at the time, and were disturbed late Saturday night by the noise of roofing sheets being ripped off a cattle shed near the house. The cattle seemed remarkably calm when we checked them, and pulled the broken sheets out of their bedding. On our return home, we were hugely saddened to find that the old oak tree between Durweston and Bryanston in the Park field, that has been leaning perilously since it lost a massive limb several years ago, had finally succumbed to gravity, and now lies sprawled and desolate. Its root ball is huge, and the hole left by it surprisingly deep.
At last, an opportunity arose to use our still shiny concrete mixer for the job it was really intended for by the manufacturer. Regular readers may recall our seed mixing habit, which doesn’t trouble the interior paintwork, whereas the first mix of concrete was likely to have a yellow hue. The project here is to prevent damp finding its way into our new classroom, the exterior soil level having been higher than the floor inside, we decided to create an open dry drain, which required the creation of a footing and a block retaining wall. Drew is once again the skilled fellow doing all the clever bits. His cast in-situ kerb is a masterpiece.
Beaver workmanship near Hinton St Mary
Our cluster group was treated to a ‘Beaver special’ a few weeks ago, Neve Bray from Dorset FWAG (farming and wildlife advisory group) took us through the history of beaver persecution followed by extinction in the UK some 400 years ago, and then moved on to explain what beavers can bring to a river catchment. Beaver fans claim they can slow down the passage of water through a catchment by creating leaky dams and wetland areas, whereas the less convinced fear they will destroy valuable trees and cause unpredictable flooding of settlements and productive land. Both would be correct, the skilled bit is in deciding where their work could be beneficial, and steer them towards it, as well as to possess the (legal and practical) ability to prevent them doing the wrong thing in the wrong place. The Dorset Stour enters the sea at Christchurch harbour, after meandering through many miles of built up area. It has a huge catchment running up to Wincanton and Stourhead in the north, and close to Sherborne in the west. With such a huge catchment it does not need very many hours of heavy rain to build a flood risk.
On a river like the Dorset Stour, where the principle passage of the river was deepened and widened by dredging in the past, and had many mills and weirs built, the main body is so far removed from a naturally functioning river habitat, that no amount of beaver work is likely be of much use, whereas some of its tributaries, which still retain their naturally formed dimensions, might be usefully modified by beaver work to slow down the movement of water during extreme rainfall events, by holding it up and only slowly releasing it into the river over a period of time which would lessen the risk of flooding further downstream. This is immediately a worry for farmers of the land alongside the tributaries, they fear their land will spend more time under water, damaging pasture or crops, or permanently reducing the productivity of the soil. However it should not be too difficult for government to devise a scheme that would reward land owners for allowing this, likely to be considerably cheaper than building massive flood barriers in the built up areas.
Intrepid explorers find Beaver handiwork on the River Otter in Devon, January 2015
But how do you prevent the beavers working where they are not wanted? They must be able to be controlled if they wander off and threaten areas where they may do significant damage. Legislation that accompanied their re-introduction, surprisingly rapidly, made them a protected species, so they cannot be touched and their dams cannot be removed without official approval.
Beavers can be legally introduced to an area deemed improvable, under licence. What is making life complicated in some areas is where beavers are being introduced without licence, or surprise surprise, they migrate to areas beyond their original release, and this very quickly causes conflict between the bealievers who enabled the release, and those who see them simply as vermin. Not helpful, and very unlikely to help with flood control or wetland development (which in the right areas is good for birds and other species), it will cause conflict, and prolong the pain suffered by people who endure the consequences of flooding, with little hope for improvement.
Sitting in on a meeting of the Stour Delivery group a few weeks ago, we were given a detailed and polished presentation on the issues of flooding in the lower Stour, from Wimborne and onwards towards Christchurch. A great deal of effort has been expended by the Environment agency in creating a detailed report on flood risk, focussing on a strategy for reducing risk of flooding to households and other property. The strategy looks at first glance well-meaning, see below:
But frankly it’s a load of bureaucratic waffle and fails to address the real problem. It is worth noting that the most vulnerable areas are those populated by Park homes (mobile homes), which have been shoehorned into areas deemed unsuitable for building due to flood risk. Should we be surprised that there is still a problem, these sites still flood! The water doesn’t care whether it is concrete and brick, or mobile homes.
The reason for reporting on this is to point out that nowhere in the report is serious attention given to attending to the quantity of water entering the lower section of the river from higher up in the catchment, following periods of heavy rain. When the question asked was “Where does most of the flooding risk come from; the excessive amount of built up area in the floodplain, or water arriving from higher in the catchment?” the answer was clear, it was the latter. Yet the report continues to discuss at great length how to reduce flood risk with construction of earth banks, concrete walls etc, and perhaps moving some of the Park homes, and doesn’t begin to address the issue in a whole catchment sense at all.
The sense of frustration was acute, the sound of balls being kicked down the road was deafening. Some of the answers are there for the taking, but no-one seems to want to try.
Our oldest cow, Freda, also known as 2244, her tag number, is 16 years old, a fine age for a cow, she has borne us 14 calves in that time, worth many 000’s in sales and food put on the table. She is the last of our original calves bought from our cousin Will when Dougal started up the suckler beef herd. We have several of her daughters in the herd today, and this year’s calf being a heifer and a pretty colour will also be kept for breeding, continuing the line.
If you are eating breakfast you might want to take a break for a few moments before proceeding…..
A couple of weeks ago our local friendly vet came to examine our cows to see how many are in calf, and to give us a rough idea in what order they will produce. Sheep are quite easy to scan for the presence of lambs, through a handy wool-free zone just in front of the udder, they can be examined with a hand held scanner connected to a screen, on a raised platform in a race. An experienced scanner can tell you how many lambs are present within 10-15 seconds. With cows it is an altogether different task, involving a long glove, a considerable amount of effort, a great deal of manure, and a small hand held scanner connected to a tiny screen embedded in a pair of special glasses. The approximate date of birth can be obtained by matching the size of the embryo to a scale on the screen. These pictures are from the archive, before the days of the electronic headset. Andrew has now given up this joyous pastime. The very sad news is that Freda is not in calf.
Cattle playing follow my leader on a lovely sunny Saturday morning, Fred leading.
The cattle are grazing cover crop, here shown on the Knoll, they are always ready to move when someone comes to let them into the new strip next day, and immediately put their heads down and start on the fresh foliage in front of them.
Here are our sheep grazing on a newly established herbal ley (grass and herbs), this was undersown last spring, into a crop of spring barley, the barley was cleared at harvest, and bingo, there is the ley growing amongst the stubble. The cows grazed it briefly back in October, and now the sheep are nibbling it down to remove annual weeds and encourage thickening up. This should mean it will be ready for the cows to return earlier in the spring than if we had sown it after harvest, in August. The more observant reader will by now have noticed clues pointing to the occurrence of fertile behaviour in this field. The yellow raddle mark on the rear of the ewe on the right tells us that young Ronnie, our new ram, has been at work. Ronnie can be seen in the left hand picture, standing next to our rather tall wether, Little Bear. Laughter erupted amongst the farm team when they first spotted Ronnie, jokes about step ladders and telephone directories proliferated, and father was even heard to ask why one of the ewes had been left behind with its lamb in the farm paddock, when the rest had been moved to better grass. Ronnie was being rested with Little Bear for a few days before being put to work. Well the doubters can rest assured that Ronnie, in spite of his Corbett-like stature, has performed as well as we could have hoped. All the ewes have been covered, and none have returned for a second service in the 12 days since the first complete 17 day cycle. Lambing with luck will begin around the 1st of May.
Some readers might have been expecting a few words on the very current issues around the government’s recent budget proposals regarding changes to inheritance tax, and agricultural and business property reliefs in particular. Please follow this link to a separate page on this issue, if it is up your particular street.
It was almost like we’ve had a famous Impressionist painter out on the farm, Jayne caught this fabulous early morning sky a few weeks ago, and then amongst myriad other northern lights photos, daughter in Devon nabbed the next one.
Hard to believe when you still haven’t witnessed it yourself, and not for want of trying. Since the event I have heard that such pictures are seriously enhanced by a phone camera, and there was I using the good old fashioned naked eye technique, and vainly expecting a smorgasbord of colour.
Here is an AI modified version of Jayne’s photo, uploaded to a random website that claims to reproduce a photo in the style of Claude Monet. Judge for yourself, personally I prefer the original.
After an eye watering 208mm of rain in September, (the average is 76mm) and 150mm in October (average 120mm) so far (it’s the 21st as I write), everything is utterly soaked. We have had so few dry days recently that autumn sowing progress has been very limited. Doug has managed to sow the winter barley on 3 separate days, only to have it pour down again very shortly after. No hope of rolling, and thank goodness we decided not to apply any pre-emergence weedkillers this year, as they can be washed into the rooting zone of the seeds by heavy rain, and risk crop damage. Some farmers who are not afraid of sowing earlier may be feeling pleased they got a shift on, there was a week-long window of opportunity at the beginning of the month. Here lie pros and cons; in our own case, we try to hold back when the weather is mild like it is at the moment, aphids carrying the barley yellow dwarf virus will still be flying and spreading it, whereas we prefer to collect the £45 per hectare bribe SFI payment, not to use insecticides, and so have to take steps like sowing later when the weather is cooler (and wetter 😩). The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) for 2024 now offers payments for 102 different options including the no-insecticide option.
4 of the 102 options for 2024 SFI
For anyone unfamiliar with this, and curious to know what public money for public goods looks like, simply search for SFI 24 options, and head for gov.uk – expanded offer for 2024, then look for Annexe B, the full list of options. Or click here, warning: it’s quite dry……..
Invitations to apply for these options were announced in July and thousands of farmers made applications, however only hundreds have been offered agreements to date, due to manual checking while (we are told) the system beds down. Defra had made huge steps forward with SFI 23, many offers were made, accepted and put into action very efficiently, as was one of our own, it pays us to undertake a number of environmental actions, including the growing of cover crops, growing companion crops (such as in our bicrops of wheat with beans) and not using insecticides.
The political reality of all this is particularly vivid right now as we await the outcome of the new government’s first budget. How much will DEFRA’s budget be cut? Will farming continue to be funded as it was in the days of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy? In those days the area based payments were regarded simply as a subsidy to enable farmers to produce food at below the true cost of production. Now, under the post Brexit arrangements created by the last UK government, we are a long way into the new era of public money for public goods, although delivery has been painfully slow. The old payments system (BPS) , based on area farmed, is now at half the value it used to be, and will be down to zero by 2027, whereas the new systems have been running behind at approximately £100 million per year for the last 3 years. This is money that used to flow into agriculture and all its associated industries, and the huge worry is that the new government will remove this from the ag budget because it wasn’t spent. This would be a huge betrayal of the industry, and was entirely because of DEFRA’s inability to get the new system fully up and running.
If the government wants to secure the nation’s home grown food supply, and to ensure that all the environmentally beneficial actions happen that SFI includes, then it will have to give clear and positive signals to farmers in order to hold their confidence, which is on a knife edge. Most environmental actions require land that would otherwise be used to produce food, to be taken out of production. This can only happen if the rewards are sufficient, and the recipients believe that the system isn’t going to lurch from one extreme to the other with every change of government. Cycles are very long in farming, and long term planning is rare enough too many areas of life these days.
Just in case anyone suspects weasel words from Defra in the future, if things go badly, here is a Weasel. I spotted him darting along the wall of the old grainstore a few weeks ago, too slow to get the phone out for a full frontal picture, this is the best I could do. He was carrying a dead mouse, I must admit I was not aware that I had such a useful ally so close at hand in my battle to control mice around the grainstores. The little fellow, not much bigger than 2 mice sown together, dropped the mouse and popped into a gap in the tinwork as you can see. I watched him for a while, but then had to get on with the job in hand. The next time I looked, he had gone, and so had the mouse.
As well as trying to sow barley and wheat between the numerous rain events, Gary has been trying to get all our compost spread, we had 4.5 km of compost windrows around the farm waiting to be spread onto our growing cover crops. On Friday last week (the 18th) he would have finished, but he was prevented by a large bearing failure, on a shaft driving the feed chain in the bottom of the machine. No chance to fix it on Friday, then more rain Friday night and Sunday, and on returning to the machine today he had a puncture in the tractor. It was a Monday morning.
Drone went AWOL
In my endless search for interesting pictures to accompany this article, I flew my drone a couple of weeks ago, hoping to obtain action footage of Gary at work, sad to report the drone developed a compass error, and with barely any warning flew off on a corkscrew path towards the Bonsley forest, and came to rest (I am supposing) high in a beech tree. Far too high and impossible to see, perhaps until leaf drop, my pictures remain unreachable and unpublishable.
The stormy weather on Sunday resulted in a day long power cut, it turned out that a pole had snapped near to the top, and the wires were shorting against each other, hence the power had flashed on and off at least 10 times, before cutting out completely. Teams were assembled from Poole, Christchurch and Ringwood before work could proceed, a pole lorry fortunately with 4 wheel drive arrived on site and eventually the problem was fixed. One of the SSE team told me they have to do a 24 hour emergency standby shift every 8 days, which can be very wearing, as they always get called out.
Nerds Corner: It has taken me many years to properly appreciate the attributes of a broom. During the course of a harvest, many acres of floor are swept, and the better the broom, the more enjoyable and satisfying the job is. The angle of the broom head, by which I mean the angle at which the bristles meet the ground, is crucial, if you only want to sweep each part of the floor once, it will help greatly if the bristles are at right angles to the floor. Second to this comes the angle of the handle, it has to be attached to the broom head at the right angle to allow the first requirement to be met, and it needs to be long enough to not have to bend over too much whilst sweeping. This may all seem blindingly obvious, but it surprising how many brooms on the farm do not meet these specifications, and do a pretty rubbish job. To the first two characteristics above I would add two more, the third would be the quality of the bristle, plastic just does not cut the mustard, they are invariably too stiff, so do not vibrate in the right way in order to keep the dust/grain/rubbish moving along in front, in general it seems that natural products like bassine are the best, they need to be stiff enough, but not too stiff, a general purpose broom will have to cope with a variety of surfaces, from lovely smooth power floated or polished concrete, to rough farmer laid concrete from the 70s, tarmac, or wooden floors, and no one wants to have to keep 3 different types of broom, so they have to be just right, as Goldilocks discovered in the house of the three bears. The last, and potentially most irritating detail is the small matter of how the handle is fixed to the head. Many heads are pre-drilled for the handle, which means there is a gap in the middle, which can then leave a line of material in every swoosh, who wants that?
Last summer I found the closest broom to perfection I have ever had the pleasure of working with, a 36 inch Bassine broom from the Bearing Boys in Norfolk, one of my favourite online suppliers for many items, from belts to bearings, as well as brooms. So I bought three more this year, and love using them. They are light too, which adds even more pleasure to the job! Bassine is a coarse leaf fibre from the palmyra palm tree that is commonly used to make brushes and brooms.
DorsetKentSussex
18th September was clearly the day that all the swallows in the south of England decided it was time to clear out to warmer climes. Fortuitous communications with birders in various counties confirmed the same assemblies forming in Kent, East Sussex and Dorset, all on the same day. Large numbers of the beautiful little birds had been spotted lining up on wires, and within hours, suddenly, they had all gone. If only we knew where to? Africa via Gibraltar is commonly suggested, but who really knows? How soon before we will be able to kit out a large enough number of swallows with tiny gps gear which could tell us all about their journeys, without seriously compromising their ability to cover the long distances they embark on? The sad fact is that in many countries they cross, miles of netting are strung up to catch them, hard to imagine why as there would be so little to eat on a swallow.
It’s lambing time down under, our friend Rachel’s small flock of sheep in the Gippsland region of Victoria have produced a gorgeous bunch of Harlequin mini meat sheep (HMMS) x Dorper lambs. It’s springtime there, there’s been rain, everywhere is green, and they are growing well.
It seems long ago that we started harvest, way back in mid July, it has turned out to be one of those long drawn out affairs, very much stop start due to very variable weather, it takes the tiniest amount of moisture to stop operations, and several hours of breeze and sunshine before we can get going again. As the season wears on, the days get shorter and the nights get damper, our resistance levels to cutting wet grain have to go lower, and we resign ourselves to longer periods spent drying, and higher fuel bills. On most farms there is a direct relationship between combining capacity, drying capacity, and what time of day you can start cutting. The bigger your combine and the smaller your drier, the later in the day you start cutting. This is where we fit in, once the combine is running, it can produce a lot of grain in a short time, up to 40 tons per hour in a heavy wheat crop, whereas the drier is only rated at 11 tons per hour, so very quickly it is overwhelmed if the grain is too moist. In the middle of a good weather day it is remarkable how quickly grain moisture drops in the field, even an hour can see it drop by 2 percent, which can make the difference between a midnight finish and an all-nighter, in the drier house.
Right now (this bit was written on the bank holiday weekend) we are in yet another rain break, having had 30mm of rain on Saturday, and another 5 mm on Saturday and Sunday nights. We have cut all the main crops, with a day’s work left on Wildfarmed bicrops that are ready, and a bit more that is not yet ripe, as with the spring beans, and the remaining cover crop seed plots.
Harvest actually started with cutting the plot of turnips destined for sowing again this year as seed in our cover crop mixes, swiftly followed by the crimson clover plot for the same purpose, and then the phacelia. Having all been autumn sown, they ripened a good deal earlier than if they’d been sown in the spring, like the buckwheat, vetch and camelina need to be, as they rarely survive the cold of winter.
These pictures show the changes in the seed plots from last autumn, through phacelia and crimson clover flowering in May, to mid July, when we cut the turnips and clover.
It was only then that we could get into harvest proper, with the oilseed rape fit to cut before the winter barley, for the first time ever.
But before any of this we had the small matter of owls in the combine spout to deal with. Those who managed to read my last episode, too long ago I know, in May, may recall that an owl had been spotted entering and leaving the unloading tube of the combine parked up in the tractor shed. Advice taken led us to believe it was likely to be a solitary male, but as so often is the case, things turned out rather differently.
Several weeks later, just as we had forgotten all about it, due to the days getting longer and the yard being quiet at dusk and overnight, some odd noises were heard from the combine. More advice was taken, and this time the conclusion was that perhaps there were chicks in the auger tube. This was mad, what crazy bird would lay eggs down a cold metal tube filled with a twisty metal auger? It was a bit of a problem, no one wants to disturb young chicks, but harvest was rapidly approaching, and we needed to run up the combine to check all was working, but we couldn’t risk mangling up any chicks. So we decided to manually turn the auger and see if we could persuade anyone in there to come out. By the number of turns on the pulley that drives the auger, we estimated that the nest must have been at least a metre down the tube, but sure enough, gradually coming into view were the pale brown feathers of a young barn owl, who we managed to catch, and move into the owl box recently installed in the tractor shed. Was there going to be another we wondered? So we turned the auger a few more times, and hey presto, out comes chick number two. When I say chick, I really mean beautiful, fully feathered young adult barn owl, who must have been on the cusp of fledging. Seeing as they had never seen daylight, they coped remarkably well. How they would have found their way out of the auger tube a metre or more from the open end, without our assistance, is a good question, and if we had not heard them, and had thrown the auger into gear a few days later, they would have been history. Fortunately we managed to get them both into the owl box, but by the morning they had managed to jump/fly out and were perching on the wall bars of the shed. After a day or two hanging around and doing some flying practise, they disappeared, but have been seen locally on numerous occasions. We think that their parents had kept them fed throughout, and will have taken them out for hunting lessons.
Returning to the cover crop theme, we have ramped up our seed mixing system a good deal this year. We have purchased a selection of tote bins, that each hold up to 1.5 tons of grain or seeds, and a brand new pan mixer (usually intended for mixing concrete). These additions have revolutionised the set up. Formerly we were hand blending purchased bags of seeds into a feed barrow, then bagging up 20kg at a time, a bit tedious after the first 20 bags. Now we are mixing 600kg at a time, using mainly home grown seeds which have been combined, dried if required, in a tote bin, then weighed directly into the mixer. The mixer sits on a pair of weigh bars, which are another essential ingredient for this new system. Once mixed, the blend, often up to 6 different species in one blend, can be decanted directly into the drill, or else into another tote bin, for later drill filling. It’s bloomin’ marvellous.
To achieve our 10 species mix overall, we create two different mixes, which can be sown at the same time, at different rates and depths by the Sky drill. Firstly a small seeds mix, comprising turnip, 2 clovers, camelina, phacelia and linseed, and secondly a large seeds mix of buckwheat, vetch, daikon radish, and peas or beans depending on whether they are to be the next cash crop in the spring. Many of these are now home grown, as can be seen in the pictures above, giving us control of the supply chain, for both prompt delivery and weed control purposes.
If we decide the seedbed will benefit from some cultivation, we can sow a simple small seeds mix through the seeder mounted on our set of discs, which again can be filled quickly and easily.
As soon as the straw was cleared from harvested fields destined for spring crops, Doug filled up the drill and headed out to sow all these seeds, it was a pretty full on job mixing seed and keeping him topped up, at the same time as managing the grainstore with Brendan and Gary pulling in loads of wheat every half hour. It was just as well that Fred kept the pressure up with the combine though, because rain soon interrupted that lovely early flow of dry grain, most of the rest since then has had to be dried.
In between the rain showers and days of harvesting, we have had great fun enjoying visits by various friends from across the world, some of whom who were happy to demonstrate the height of our fennel/teasel etc bird food plot.
You may think I am a little obsessed with cover crop seeds and grainstore activity, but that is the nature of harvest for the old git left in the farmyard while everyone else swans around in supercooled hifi cabins, with the steering done by satnav. Once the seeds plots were cut, we had to first dry them, using a rather Heath-Robinson arrangement, and then run them over the old Rutherford cleaner. The picture here attempts to explain how this works, using a series of screens peppered with regular sized holes, huge sieves if you will, the lower set have an arrangement with a frame below which carries a set of brushes, which slowly weaves from side to side, keeping the screen clean, which would otherwise bung up with seeds, stones or trash jammed in the holes.
We also use this machine to separate the bicrops, first through was the spring oat/bean mix, which separated quite well, then we were able to run the oats through the drier on their own, which now sit in a heap awaiting sale. Next up was the field of spring barley with peas. Again the basic separation has gone well, but removal of the embarrassing level of cleaver seeds has been more of a challenge, even after drying, which I had hoped would shrivel them smaller and make them easier to remove, far too many remain. A cleaning charge will have to be faced, running over a gravity separator off farm may be the only way to clean them out. Modern farmers will be yelling at the screen right now, asking why on earth did we not use more weedkiller to solve the cleaver problem? We couldn’t do this because the contract we have with Wildfarmed for these odd combination crops stipulates no weedkiller or fungicide, and only limited amounts of artificial fertiliser. However early gross margin calculations are showing that these two particular combinations have performed significantly better than any solo spring bean or linseed crop, and compare favourably with our other crops apart from the first wheats. The winter wheat with beans blend however, was awful, riddled with disease and very short on yield, despite having looked strong for much of the season. We have yet to finish separating the spring wheat/bean blend, so cannot yet declare a result. Lateness of sowing has definitely put the lid on yield hopes, but it will be better than the winter blend.
As I write, the millet is looking fantastic, how we will know when to cut it is however a bit of a challenge, the leaves are still very green, but the seeds are beginning to turn
Trade was brisk and prices positive at the straw sale we hosted in early July, with our friends from Symonds and Sampson. With a record turnout of over 130 buyers, sellers and viewers, 10,000 acres went under the hammer, and the vast majority found a home. After a long wet winter, straw stores are empty, and poor crops due to the same wet winter has led to fears of straw being short. Many livestock farmers, generally further west from here, still rely heavily on straw to bed and feed their animals over winter.
A great image snapped by one of our teacher guests last term. I always like to ask the children who they think is the more interested party on school visit days, themselves the brightly coloured and rather noisy inhabitants of the trailer, or the waggle-eared, damp-nosed, tail-swishing munchers of herbage in the field.
Three very greedy young pigs are with us for the summer, enjoying an entirely home grown diet for the first time. Our local mobile feed wagon called in to mill up some wheat, barley, peas and beans, to which I add 10% of protein-rich rape meal from which we have squeezed the oil, then mix into a yummy porridge, which they slurp down in seconds. They are certainly growing well on it, with a month to go they look like they will perform at least as well as when predecessors were fed on purchased weaner pellets, which no doubt contain imported soya from who knows where.
There’s always someone who insists on going the wrong way when we move the sheep between paddocks, luckily help was at hand from willing helpers who just happened to be passing.
Buckwheat has grown really well this year, it looks lovely, the best harvesting time is tricky to determine, being indeterminate, there will still be flowers when we cut it, but seeds at the bottom will start to fall out before flowering ends.
For those interested in the rewilding / nutrient neutrality / Poole harbour topic, which I have covered in these pages before, it will be no surprise that the news in July that Dorset Council was considering the purchase of a farm in order to ‘rewild’ it and hence generate nitrate credits, was going to be controversial. The problems of pollution in the Poole Harbour catchment have long been an issue in south Dorset, where farmers have been going through a painful process to firstly understand, and secondly to begin to moderate, the (theoretical) leaching of nitrate from their land. They have been obliged to complete the Nitrate Leaching Tool created by the Environment Agency, a now largely discredited spreadsheet tool, which attempts to calculate the nitrate output generated by different kinds of farming. The scheme is underpinned by a notional maximum leached quantity of N beyond which they will have to pay a penalty. Ultimately the idea is that farmers with spare N capacity will be able to trade it with farmers who wish to continue with a nitrogen heavy regime on their land. Confusion begins to set in when you add into the mix the water company, who seem to find it cheaper to buy these N units, than to install better sewage treatment facilities, (there is still dispute about who is responsible for how much of the pollution, water companies or farmers).
Now we see huge amounts of public money being spent on buying farmland (see my piece on Lyscombe farm and Dorset Wildlife Trust here), which will make no difference to the pollution in the harbour, but is somehow freeing up planning permission for thousands of new houses in the catchment, for which the developers and land owners have to pay £3250 per nitrate credit. The number of nitrate credits they must purchase is calculated by multiplying the average number of inhabitants of the planned new dwellings (2.42 for a house, 1.65 for a flat) by a standard amount of nitrate emission per person (3.5kg per year). This figure is then reduced to 25% due to 3/4 of the nitrate deemed to be removed by the water company’s treatment works. This calculation comes from Dorset Council’s 2017 Nitrogen Reduction in Poole Harbour Supplementary Planning Document.
The Council’s calculation shows that for the 3700 houses “released” by the purchase of Lyscombe farm, there will be 6.845 tons of nitrogen produced, which will need to be mitigated. What makes this more confusing is the wildly different calculation by Natural England in a recent letter where they claim the pollution caused by the 3700 new homes in the Poole catchment will only comprise 3.587 tons. Who does one believe, can we in fact believe either of them? You will detect a great deal of cynicism here, I have farming and landscape as a deep concern, and am not impressed by computer driven modelling used by the officers of national bodies to drive very expensive land purchases which do not begin to solve the actual problem. A great deal more difference could be made to Poole harbour if the money was spent in more imaginative fashion, EG:
Use proper science to obtain accurate estimates of real time emissions from different types of farmland, using porous pots, run-off traps and other methods
Where necessary persuade farmers, with financial support, that in some cases it may be time to alter some of their farming practises, eg move or close dairies and slurry stores positioned close to rivers.
Devise targeted schemes to pay farmers to withdraw intensive, or even all farming, from specific areas, for example within 100 metres from any water bodies, or more controversially from drained land which can carry nutrients direct from the land into waterways.
Fortunately Dorset Council’s attempt to buy the farm in the article above has been cancelled, one can only hope that they can come up with better ideas for reducing the impacts on the environment of more building and more people, with this pot of money that they were given by the Department of levelling up Housing and Communities (DLUHC) (recently renamed the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government).
Notes from a day out with Dorset Wildlife Trust at Lyscombe. Friday 10 May 2024
Brian Bleese, Chief Exec of DWT introduced proceedings, he first introduced George McGavin, President, who very enthusiastically described the importance of the deal that resulted in the purchase of Lyscombe Farm, and the plan for the day.
Others followed, including Tony Juniper (Chair) and Marian Spain (Chief exec) of Natural England. There was repetition of the self-congratulatory theme, and we were told that so many organisations and individuals have gone above and beyond to achieve this ground breaking deal, which, several speakers noted, will not only unlock the building of 3700 new houses in the catchment, but will also make a huge difference to Poole harbour itself, which currently languishes under a pollution-fuelled mat of green algae, which was so visible from the train on the way down to Dorchester from London that morning.
The meeting had coincided with a release from Government of a piece announcing this amazing scheme which will allow for thousands of new houses to be built in the south west.
Thousands of new homes for development are to be enabled in Dorset thanks to the government backed Nutrient Mitigation Scheme, Natural England has announced today (Friday 10 May).
The scheme will enable around 3,700 new homes to be built in the catchment over the next few years whilst protecting water quality.
By securing nutrient mitigation at Lyscombe, the scheme will enable new homes to be built in the catchment whilst protecting numerous rare birds such as avocets, spoonbills and black-tailed godwits from additional pollution that affects their precious habitat within Poole Harbour.
To quote Marian Spain in the government’s press release above: “The purchase of Lyscombe is a significant step forward for nutrient mitigation and a boost for sustainable development. Providing nutrient credits through work at sites like these will ensure that we can keep building homes for the future, without harming our waterways.”
I tried to ask questions at one point, specifically, could they share with us the calculations which showed how this 330 hectare farm could mitigate the potential pollution from 3700 homes? But questions were not being taken. Secondly, how could 330 ha of farmland (farmed organically since 2000) improve the nutrient status of Poole harbour on its own, being only 0.4% of the 80,000 hectare catchment? Thirdly, how does the purchase of the farm demonstrate good value for public money, costing as it would have at least £10 million?
We were then divided into groups and set off on walks to different parts of the farm, I was fortunate to be in a group with Giles Foster Mitchell, retiring farm manager for Mark Russell, the vendor of the farm. A small group of us managed to get some tricky subjects aired, mostly with a very helpful chap from Natural England. (John Stobart). Giles told us the farm has been organic since 2000, has not had a dairy in recent years and has been largely run as an extensive beef and sheep enterprise, with some of the arable area on the flatter top parts of the farm being rented out to a local organic farmer, who brought in manures.
We had walked down across the farm to meet the Little Piddle, a stream which emerges from a spring a little further up the valley we were in. Rob our DWT guide had explained the early plans the trust has for improving the stream and its environment, re-routing it from its artificially deepened current route, so that a boggy wetland will result, which will be able to slow down the flow of water, and allow any nutrients in it to be absorbed by plants before it continues to wend its way ultimately to Poole Harbour. The wetland itself will become a valuable wildlife habitat. The stream usually flows all year.
It should be noted here that Lyscombe farm, although farmed extensively and organic for many years, is surrounded by other farms which operate more intensively, with large dairy pig and arable operations nearby, so it is quite feasible that the spring water will be carrying excess nitrates leached from elsewhere, so a wetland to help clean the stream will indeed be beneficial.
John from NE, and his colleague Nikki went a considerable way to explain different aspects of the deal that led to the purchase of Lyscombe farm, which involved at least 3 different sources of funds, each of which were targeted at different parts of the farm. The Nutrient Neutrality money, through Natural England’s Nutrient Mitigation scheme, has been used to buy the portion of the farm that has been arable most recently, and although having been organic for the last 24 years, can still be attributed with nutrient neutrality credits. We were told the deal has unlocked the building of 3700 houses, enough to at least raise the eyebrows, but the people running the project, when questioned, are not really pretending that the farm is actually supposed to mitigate for all of the pollution caused by those houses in the future, in spite of what was implied at the start of the meeting. (Government’s own figures for housing density are 35 per hectare, so the notional 3700 new houses will commit approx 105ha to concrete, tarmac and gardens. I can’t help wondering if this would include schools, shops, hospitals, roads, etc, or whether that would require even more space.)
John explained how the fact that the land is being committed in perpetuity, and will never return to agricultural production, adds significantly to its value in terms of nutrient mitigation. He also explained that to make the calculations which result in mitigation values being attributable to schemes like this, a computer model called Farmscoper was employed.
(Farmscoper is a decision support tool to assess diffuse agricultural pollutant loads on a farm. It can also quantify the impacts of farm mitigation methods on these pollutants.
The farm systems within the tool can be customised to reflect management and environmental conditions representative of farming across England and Wales. The tool contains over 100 mitigation methods, including many of those in the Defra Mitigation Method User Guide. From ADAS)
Interesting to note here that Farmscoper was a few years ago assessed as one of a number of possible systems available that could be used by the Environment Agency and farmers in the Poole Harbour catchment to monitor/calculate farm activity and nitrate leaching risk, but the EA decided it was not suitable for farmers to use in this instance. Since then the now discredited Nutrient Leaching Tool (NLT) has been developed, imposed upon farmers, and repeatedly found seriously inadequate for the task of matching farm activity to leaching risk. The EA have now had to back off with it, pending a comprehensive rewrite, or replacement. Consequently several years of potentially valuable data collection from across the catchment have been wasted.
Returning to the conversation with John Stobart, we learnt that a different pot of money, from Natural England’s National Nature Reserves funding, has purchased the SSSI and other low input environmentally sensitive areas of the farm, but which DWT will manage.
The speakers had claimed over and over how projects like this can help to rescue Poole harbour, but during the conversations afterwards it was quite easy to feel that this had been somewhat misleading. What was missing was the detail. In our small group by the stream, John spent a great deal of time, faced with persistent questioning, explaining how the project at Lyscombe will have huge knock-on effects, far greater and more valuable, both environmentally and financially, than will actually occur on the farm itself. Quite difficult to grasp, we now understand that projects like this are very effective, for example, in putting huge pressure on water companies to clean up their act and reduce river pollution from sewage treatment works outflows. Considering the huge exposure in recent months on the size of the problems facing our rivers, I felt he was being somewhat optimistic.
After an illuminating conversation, some of which was admittedly a struggle to understand in every aspect, we suggested that it is essential that they (DWT/NE) make significant efforts to explain the deal in simple terms for public consumption, in order to head off the noisy criticism that is likely to emerge. The questions at the top of this piece are on the lips of very many farmers in the PH catchment, in which Lyscombe sits, and although we heard a pretty full explanation of the big picture benefits that should flow from the purchase of the land, the immediate difficulties faced by farmers in the catchment are not addressed at all. The value for money question is particularly pertinent here. For the last 5 years, farmers in the PH catchment have been threatened with the imposition of a Water Protection Zone, which if imposed would reduce the catchment to trees and a little bit of ‘dog and stick’ farming. Hence the catchment’s 500 farmers are extremely worried, their livelihood would be destroyed. During the last 5 years, the Poole Harbour Nutrient Management scheme (PHNMS) has been formed by the EA, and the Poole Harbour Agricultural Group (PHAG) has brought together many of the catchment’s farmers as a coherent and co-operative body. At the heart of the work of PHNMS has been the NLT, which from the start has been troublesome, unreliable, and has undermined much of the goodwill binding the PH project together.
When explaining this to the NE people, relating the Lyscombe project to the problems faced by farmers (and EA) in the PH catchment, they claimed the situations are very different and shouldn’t be considered together. This land use change at Lyscombe is for ever, in perpetuity, whereas PH has to be solved in shorter timescales. I said over and over that if money can be found for a project like this, then money must be found for a proper NLT and to properly progress the works needed in the catchment. They agreed, however as happens all too often, it is clear that they work in silos, and being different issues, these people have no control over the decisions and funding needed for Poole Harbour. Patently ridiculous, seeing how many time PH was mentioned at the beginning of the meeting.
Questions needing answers
I would like to see the calculations which show how this 330 hectare farm could mitigate the potential pollution from 3700 homes?
How can a change in management of 330 ha of farmland (farmed organically since 2000) improve the nutrient status of Poole harbour on its own, being only 0.4% of the 80,000 ha catchment?
How does the purchase of the farm demonstrate good value for public money, costing as it would have at least £10 million?
Should we be worried about Nutrient neutrality units being traded out of catchment?
Will they share the break down of the financing for the project, it would be helpful to understand exactly how much and where the money has come from. I think this could be helpful as well to understand if there are any funding mechanisms we could tap into in the PH catchment that haven’t yet been explored as well as where public money has been used.
If this turns into a trend, led by NE and ambitious NGOs, is there a danger a huge amount of money will be spent achieving practically nothing in terms of actually reducing pollution?
Alternatives you could spend the money on:
Help water companies clean up
Help farmers learn new techniques to use fert and manure more efficiently, eg the NLT
Pay farmers to lay off any N or Muck application up to 200m from any waterway
Pay farmers to not use fert at rates higher than, for example 100kg/ha
Stop press 2nd July, Dorset Council have just announced they are purchasing a former dairy farm at Higher Kingcombe, using a grant from central government.
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cljyrr3yj0xo?s=08
From BBC news website: A local authority is buying a dairy farm as part of nature-recovery efforts.
Dorset Council has agreed to buy Middle Farm at Higher Kingcombe, which sits alongside a Dorset Wildlife Trust (DWT) nature reserve.
The council said changing its use to woodland or rewilding the area would reduce harmful nutrients flowing from the farm into watercourses.
The exact purchase price of the farm has not been disclosed, although the council has received a £4.63m grant from central government.
The authority has not confirmed whether the cost is higher or lower than the grant total.
In a statement, it said the current intensive use as a dairy farm was “not ideal” as it suffered from run-off and soil erosion.
“The land is ideally located to deliver both nutrient reduction and nature recovery in the headwaters of the River Hooke.
“Changing its use to woodland or rewilding can reduce nitrates as required and could be achieved with little investment,” it said.
The sale was approved by the former Conservative administration and is continuing after the Liberal Democrats took control of the council following the local elections.
Dorset Council said it was supported by Natural England and that there had been discussions with DWT, which runs the adjacent Kingcombe National Nature Reserve.
A few weeks ago our experimental area of bi-cropped wheat with crimson clover looked like this. The clover, sown at the same time as the wheat last autumn, has become rather dominant, and when it then rained heavily a week or so later, pretty much the whole lot laid over. Since then the clover has finished flowering and started to die back, and some of the wheat has managed to stand up again. However the early clover dominance will have depressed the potential yield of the wheat, which is the part we get paid for, and it is far too late now for the wheat to throw up more tillers to fill in the gaps. The difficulty with minority interest cropping like this is that there is not much guidance aavailable for seed rates etc, so there is quite a lot of guess work. The wheat/clover bi-crop last year went the other way, we used a less vigorous white clover, so lacking in vigour that there was barely any there at all by spring. Some other farmers across the country, trying similar things, are having better luck than us, this is what a good clover under-storey looks like, although if I’m honest, there’s not enough cereal (oats I think) in this field.
The reason for the bi-cropping is to see if we can move away from mono-cropping, which can have poor outcomes for soil and environmental health. We are growing the wheat for Wildfarmed, a new company dedicated to growing and baking healthy food which does not degrade the environment, and making it widely available on the high street. Bread widely available in Waitrose and M&S. No chems and limited nitrogen, plus a crop partner. Diverse families of roots in the soil foster a broader range of mycorrhizal and other organic activity in the soil, one way of doing this is to keep an under-storey going through several seasons, it keeps the soil shielded from hot sun and heavy rain, the clover fixes its own nitrogen, some of which can become available to the following crop as the clover dies and regrows. A good under-storey can also shade out weeds. Diversity is one of the five guiding principles of soil focussed, regenerative farming, which, thanks to the great god Gabe Brown from North Dakota, can be summarised as follows:
Minimise soil disturbance. Minimising physical and chemical disturbance to the soil prevents damage to the micro-flora and fauna that form the soil ecosystem. …
Keep the soil covered. …
Maintain living roots in the soil. …
Maximise plant diversity. …
Reintroduce livestock.
And here is the great god himself, discussing the finer points of soil management with a hairy farmer from Dorset. Doug tells me that Gabe has recently added a 6th important element, that of context – by which he means that how you apply these principles to your land should also consider the context, your soil type, location, altitude, aspect etc. Gabe’s book ‘Dirt to Soil’ is considered by many to be the regenerative bible, it’s a great story, and full of useful guidance. Not all that emanates from the US is bad!
Out here in our herbal ley fields, our cows are happily munching away in their mobs, they have got very used to being moved on to fresh grazing every day, and don’t hesitate to let the world know if we are late to move them on. This year’s rainy spring has led to a very vigorous grass growth everywhere, an early hay cut has been taken in places, and even parts of the river meadows have been mob grazed this year to force the animals to graze it properly. The system is working well with the lightweight Kiwi-designed electric fence easy to move, and a network of water pipe across the fields with quick release push-fit fittings so that it is straightforward to empty and move the troughs daily.
As you can see, Theo the bull is enjoying his favourite 6 weeks of the year, with a mob of cows and their calves, including the pretty one in the foreground, one of his daughters from last year, out of cows with a certain amount of Belgian Blue in their genes, which has given us two calves this year with freckles and a white line along the spine, a little reminiscent of the rare breed Gloucester cattle.
Advantages from mob grazing include the following: Fewer flies bothering the animals, fresh grazing every day moves the cattle off yesterdays dung pats where the flies often congregate. Fresh grazing also reduces the pressure from intestinal worms, a 50 day cycle between the grazing of any single part of the field helps to break the lifecycle of worms, so less wormer is needed, which when present in the dungpats, can kill the flies and beetles on which species like the rare Greater Horseshoe bat thrive. (See last month for more on this). Some of the herbs which the animals are grazing can themselves have an anthelmintic effect (discourage or kill intestinal worms). Mob grazing which leaves around a third of the pasture behind allows the plants to regrow more quickly than traditional grazing which takes nearly all the herbage, because there is still enough leaf to enable plenty of photosynthesis. As plants are grazed down, their roots die back, and therefore they take even longer to recover and regrow, both under and above soil level.
Several weeks ago this fellow was spotted emerging from the end of the unloading auger on our combine, so our good friend Alan was called up, and he put in many patient hours of watching and waiting before catching a string of wonderful pictures as Wol emerged, and then took off for his early evening patrol of the surrounding area. We decided that he was probably a lone male, roosting in the combine during the day, amongst other haunts we believe he uses. Seeing as we will need the combine in a few weeks’ time, Alan advised us to erect an owl box in the vicinity, in the hope that he moves over before harvest, and that maybe he might find a mate for next season. The giveaway for other roosting spots are the owl pellets on the floor, and great slashes of white poo below the roost. Have you ever pulled apart an owl pellet? Fascinating to find the tiny bones of many little rodents, tidily wrapped up in the indigestible skin of the unfortunate prey. I have to admit to being very impressed by Chris Packham’s ability to identify different species of small mammals from the jawbones and teeth patterns thereon, which he had teased out of owl pellets on one springwatch episode.
Following swiftly on the heels of the bluebell season, the wild garlic show was as good as it gets this year, here is Fishmore hill near Milton Abbas, the ultimate Dingly Dell, always a joy to drive through at the right time of year, and below is the lane down to Bramblecombe farm from Milton Abbas, where the bridleway crosses the road, thick with garlic on both sides, the walking boots always take on a marvellous aroma.
The problem with failing to keep up with a monthly edition of this publication, is that with so much going on at this time of year, things are being missed, I really must try harder. Here is Tangle with the first lambs of the season, born on May 5th, they are now considerably bigger. We had a good lambing, one triplet, 3 singles and 8 twins, overall average 175%. 12 ewes is admittedly not much to get excited about, but you need to remember these are special sheep, kept entirely for their entertainment value for school visits, and not at all for commercial reasons. Many a child has lit up when let loose with the sheep and a handful of toast, the screams of laughter and excitement are a great reward, I am quite often told that children otherwise uninspired by school life, come alive on such outings. Sheep therapy should become a thing, they are rich in character and greediness.
A fascinating seminar with local grain merchant Bartholomews, held at the Hall and Woodhouse brewery, not only fed a group of farmers with a very fine cooked breakfast, but with vital intelligence on the current grain markets. An essential event in the farming year, this meeting, presented by grain trader Edd Britton, gave us much useful information which will help us to navigate the minefield that is the world wheat market for the next few months. The weather in the US and Russia, (both major world wheat producers) have been very influential factors recently, with quite violent up and down swings in grain price over a short period of time, making rational sales decisions very tricky. The graph here shows how the balance between import and export of wheat in and out of the UK has altered over the last 10 years. In most years we are now a net importer, for several reasons, firstly the good old reliable British weather, followed by the bioethanol and starch plants further north, which take a great deal of grain, sucking it in from a wide area, and helping keep the market buoyant. However if prices rise too far they will close for a while until things calm down. Then there are generally lower levels of production as farmers commit more land to environmental schemes, taking (usually poorer) land out of production in exchange for payments of public money for public goods like wild flower headlands and wild bird food. Housebuilding has some effect, taking land out of production for ever, and then there is the contentious issue of organisations like the Dorset Wildlife Trust, in conjunction with Natural England, purchasing land with Nutrient Neutrality money, paid by housing developers in exchange for planning permission. Please see this page https://viewfromthehill.org.uk/my-day-out-at-lyscombe-farm-cheselbourne for a full account of my day out with the DWT as they celebrated the revolutionary purchase of Lyscombe farm, which by reverting it to 100% nature, and no food production, will somehow unlock the building of 3700 new homes in the Poole harbour catchment, in which the farm sits. As you will see, I am not convinced by the wisdom of this in terms of value for money, or whether any actual improvement will occur in Poole Harbour as a result of this purchase. Is this where I should be banging on about the importance of looking after our home grown food supply? There has to be room for food production to thrive, we have a growing population, and some of the best soils and weather climates for food production anywhere in the world, but without care for soils and nature, healthy food production will become increasingly difficult. Weeds and insects become resistant to chemicals, which all too often wreak collateral and unintended damage elsewhere, so we have to learn to be cleverer.
Fred’s big sky big hay yield picture from the meadows. We haven’t seen grass like this for a very long time on this field, something to do with being flooded 4 or 5 times over the winter perhaps, borrowing fertility from upstream?
Another big sky from when the rape was in flower, the green, yellow, blue, and clouds look just wonderful.
A common spotted orchid found in a brand new site, on a wildflower margin miles from any other orchids. Now approximately 14 years away from being intensively farmed, we are seeing some interesting plants showing up on our oldest margins, I am reliably informed that the tiny orchid seeds, almost dust-like, will have sat in the soil for decades, waiting for the right conditions to return to enable germination. They need the right mycorrhizal conditions to develop, to connect the seeds with the right nutrients in the soil. They have endured so many years asleep in the soil, through generations of evolving human activity, only to return to life when government schemes pay farmers to rein back a bit on the intensive farming, we have to make room for nature in and around our food production, and this shows it can work.
Baboons invade Durweston, during Dorset Art weeks. Not only a very skilled photographer of owls, hares, newts, and countless other wildlife, our clever friend Alan has been exhibiting his latest talent. I love the way the chicken wire has been brought to life, the animal has a cheeky look to him.
We also played host here at the farm, to local artists, during the county wide art festival, such a variety of work was to be found down so many winding lanes, in private houses or other venues in the towns and villages across Dorset. Here is a lovely painting by Claire Thomas, exhibited at the Big Yellow Bus project in Shillingstone, it is a view of the lane between Travellers Rest and Shepherds Corner, I love her interpretation.
Dog endlessly fascinated by these prickly garden visitors, they are definitely enjoying a revival around these parts.
Bear with me while I explain. One of the main ecological benefits derived from domestic livestock stems from their dung which, when deposited naturally on pasture, can support huge numbers of insects. These insects in turn may serve as food for birds. My aim here is to draw attention to the importance of livestock dung in the lives of birds, and the adverse trends of recent decades which have greatly reduced its value as a source of insects. Generally speaking, large herbivores are not good at digesting their food. Typically, they extract only 10–30% of the nourishment it contains, and shunt out the rest as dung. Many small animals have evolved to take advantage of this. Worldwide, thousands of species of flies and beetles are dung specialists, and many other insects eat it along with other organic matter. Among the specialist beetles, both larvae and adults eat dung, but in many of the flies only the larvae develop on dung while the adults eat different things. Cow dung has been most studied, and each pat can feed hundreds of insects and other organisms (Lawrence 1954; Jones 2017). It is one of the wettest of types, with a moisture content of 73–89%. When it emerges, as a more or less homogeneous stream, it is fresh, fragrant and glistening, but as soon as it hits the ground it starts to dry, and a crust forms over its surface, slowing further moisture loss. Masses of flies and beetles arrive within minutes of its release, and by the second day their numbers are high, up to 200 beetles having been found in a single pat. Predatory insects arrive soon afterwards, feeding on the dung-feeders. During the first 2–3 weeks, eggs continue to hatch within the dung and insect numbers reach an overall peak, declining thereafter. By about the second week, the pat no longer attracts hordes of new visitors, but the developing larvae and maggots feed quietly within. Some adult beetles are still present, but others have moved off to new pats. By about eight weeks, the dung begins to look more fibrous. It has lost its smell and it begins to crumble, in places looking powdery, and attracting some different creatures. Gradually, mainly by the actions of dung beetles, the pat becomes buried underground, where it rots and contributes to further plant growth. Earthworms accumulate below and grass returns to the site. Standard decay times for cowpats in Britain vary from about seven to more than 20 weeks, depending mainly on ambient temperatures (Jones 2017). Different insects feed on dung at different times of year, and in addition more earthworms occur within pats in winter than in summer. In a pioneering study, Lawrence (1954) found that, on average, each cowpat produced about 1,000 developing insects. Each animal deposited 7–10 pats per day, but some were destroyed by trampling or in other ways, so he assumed six suitable pats per day. This was equivalent to 6,000 insects per day, or nearly 2.2 million insects per year (mostly flies) for each beast kept outside year-round (these estimates are not, of course, applicable to dung stored as muck-heaps or slurry). Accepting seasonal and other variations, Lawrence went on to estimate the total annual production of insect biomass from the dung of each cow or bullock kept on pasture. He concluded that ‘a cow leaves in its faeces enough food material in a year to support an insect population, mostly dipterous larvae, equal to at least one-fifth of its own weight.’ Not all insects that used the dung could be included in his calculation, so for this and other reasons, his estimate should be regarded as minimal. It also excludes worms of various kinds, which are also eaten by birds. But as a rough guide, we could say that, in five years, each cow or bullock kept outside on pasture can produce its own weight in dung insects. Many bird species in Britain exploit the insects associated with cow dung, and each pat can provide food over many weeks. Wagtails and others pick flies off the surface; Jackdaws Coloeus monedula and other corvids, Common Starlings Sturnus vulgaris, BB eye In praise of cow dung Northern Lapwings Vanellus vanellus and other waders, Black-headed Gulls Chroicocephalus ridibundus and others dig into dung pats and turn over the pieces to expose the insect larvae and beetles within. Barn Swallows Hirundo rustica and others catch the aerial insects above, as do many species of bats. Oystercatchers Haematopus ostralegus nesting on inland pastures first pick the flies and beetles off the surface of fresh pats; 10–15 days later they start to probe into the pats for beetle larvae; and after two months, when the pat has mostly rotted, they probe in the soil beneath for earthworms (Briggs 1984). During autumn and winter, the majority of cowpats present in the countryside can be pecked open by birds in search of worms and beetles. Eurasian Curlews Numenius arquata probe deeply for the larvae of Dor Beetles Geotrupes stercorarius buried beneath each pat (Potts 2012). Insects from cattle dung can be especially important to Lapwing and other wader chicks. On the Solway, such insects formed more than 80% of the diets of adult and young waders (Rankin 1979). In the Netherlands, some 21%, 30% and 49% of faecal samples from Lapwing chicks contained the remains of dung fly (Scathophaga), dung beetle Aphodius (Scarabaeidae) and soldier fly (Stratio myidae) larvae respectively (Beintema et al. 1991). The equivalent figures for Black-tailed Godwit Limosa limosa were 73%, 18% and 66%; for Ruff Calidris pugnax 33%, 29% and 46%; and for Common Redshank Tringa totanus 17%, 9% and 26%. These and other dung insects were evidently important to growing waders, and often more than one type was found in the same sample. But whereas Lapwing chicks fed on insects from within the dung, godwit chicks picked insects mainly from the surface of the pats and nearby vegetation. The other species exploited both sources more or less equally. However, there is another ‘fly’ in this story. Livestock dung deposited naturally on pasture now produces much less bird food than in the past. Not only have cattle almost disappeared from parts of the country in recent decades, but many are now kept inside buildings or yards, in winter only or year-round. In the 1950s, almost all farms in Britain kept cattle, but now the estimated figure is less than 40%. But another important development, from around 1980, was the introduction of anthelmintic drugs given to livestock to destroy gut parasites. These drugs are administered in various ways, but for weeks after dosing, they are excreted in the dung, where they last for a further several weeks, killing many of the creatures that could otherwise live in it, as well as others in the soil below, including earthworms (McCracken 1989, 1993; Madsen et al. 1990; McCracken & Foster 1994; Edwards 2004).
Dung flies and dung beetles are major casualties. The most widely used compounds for this purpose are the avermectins, particularly ‘ivermectin’ introduced in 1981. At the concentrations normally found in dung, adult beetles are seldom killed, but their egg-laying may be reduced, and larval development is slowed or prevented (Strong 1993; O’Hea et al. 2010). Fly larvae are more often killed outright, especially those of Cyclorrhapha, which is one of the most sensitive genera, showing a range of responses from death of larvae to developmental abnormalities in adults (McCracken & Foster 1993). Other British Birds 111 • November 2018 • 636 – 638 637 BB eye 413. A fresh cowpat with Yellow Dung Flies Scathophaga stercoraria, Dumfries & Galloway, 2015. Richard & Barbara Mearns chemicals are also administered to cattle to destroy other parasites. The net effects are that the numbers of insects emerging from cowpats of treated animals are much reduced compared with those from untreated ones and that, over time, dung-feeding insects have gradually declined. So much so, that a special group was recently set up to assess the current status of dung beetles and foster their conservation (the Dung Beetle UK Mapping Project, or DUMP). Little is known of the impact of this food loss on birds. However, Red-billed Choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax depend heavily on dung-based invertebrates, and a halving of their numbers on Islay between 1988 and 2013 was associated with a large reduction of dung insects in the diet (MacGillivray et al. 2018). In fact, most of the bird species that feed on dung-feeding insects have declined markedly in recent decades, raising the question of how much their individual declines could also be linked with this massive reduction in food supplies provided by dung. Interestingly, organic farms now hold significantly greater numbers and variety of dung beetles than conventional farms (Hutton & Giller 2003; Geiger et al. 2010). The important message, however, is that dung insects – so important to many birds in the past – represent a sizeable component of insect loss over recent decades which has so far been largely ignored in assessments of the factors involved in farmland bird declines.
References Beintema, A. J., Thissen, J. B.,Tensen, D., & Visser, G. H. 1991. Feeding ecology of Charadriiform chicks in agricultural grassland. Ardea 79: 31–43. Briggs, K. B. 1984. The breeding ecology of coastal and inland Oystercatchers in north Lancashire. Bird Study 31: 141–147. Edwards, C. A. 2004. Earthworm Ecology. 2nd edn. CRC Press, London. Geiger, F., van der Lubbe, C. T. M., Brunsting, A. M. H., & de Snoo, G. R. 2010. Insect abundance in cow pats in different farming systems. Entomologische Berichten 70: 106–110. Hutton, S. A., & Giller, P. S. 2003. The effects of the intensification of agriculture on northern temperate dung beetle communities. J. Appl. Ecol. 40: 994–1007. Jones, R. 2017. Call of Nature: the secret life of dung. Pelagic Publishing, Exeter. Lawrence, B. R. 1954. The larval inhabitants of cowpats. J. Anim. Ecol. 23: 234–260. MacGillivray, F. S., Gilbert, G., & McKay, C. R. 2018. The diet of a declining Red-billed Chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax population on Islay. Bird Study doi.org/10.1080/00063657.2018.1505826 Madsen, M., et al. 1990. Treating cattle with ivermectin: effects on the fauna and decomposition of dung pats. J. Appl. Ecol. 27: 1–15. McCracken, D. I. 1989. Ivermectin in cow dung: possible adverse effects on the Chough? In: Choughs and Land-use in Europe. Proceedings of an international workshop on the conservation of the Chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax in the EC. The Scottish Chough Study Group. — 1993. The potential for avermectins to affect wildlife. Veterinary Parasitology 48: 273–280. — & Foster, G. N. 1993. The effect of ivermectin on the invertebrate fauna associated with cow dung. Environ. Toxicol. & Chem. 12: 73–84. — & — 1994. Invertebrates, cow-dung and the availability of potential food for the Chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax L.) on pastures in Northwest Islay. Environ. Conserv. 21: 262–266. O’Hea, N. M., Kirwan, L., Giller, P. S., & Finn, J. A. 2010. Lethal and sub-lethal effects of ivermectin on north temperate dung beetles, Aphodius ater and Aphodius rufipes (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae). Insect Conserv. & Diversity 3: 24–33. Potts, G. R. 2012. Partridges. Collins, London. Rankin. 1979. Breeding waders on Rockcliffe Marsh. Wader Study Group Bull. 26: 25. Strong, L. 1993. Overview: the impact of avermectins on pastureland ecology. Veterinary Parasitology 48: 3–17. Ian Newton 638 British Birds 111 • November 2018 • 636 – 638
Not really what you need when towing a 10 ton load of seed through town, right outside the Hall and Woodhouse brewery in fact, during a short break in the weather, sufficient to sow around 60ha of our 220ha spring sowing programme. Pat from Blandford Tyres was on the scene very quickly and we managed to get the tyre blown up, the trailer unhitched and the tractor into the brewery car park for a proper repair to be made. (An old factory repair on the previously tubeless tyre had given out, so Pat had to put in a £150 tube.) Brendan came to the rescue with another tractor and took the seed trailer on to the drill, and we got the barley sown by the skin of our teeth before it rained again, but the soil was too wet to roll, like every other field this spring, and half the autumn sown crops too.
Before I wallow too indulgently in self-pity I’d better put in a word for the farmers who farm land a good deal wetter than ours. Our chalk based soils drain quite quickly compared to the heavier clays on which much of the country depends for its food. Countless thousands of hectares of winter crops have been under water for many months in some parts of the country, and of course the crops will have been destroyed with precious little chance of the soil drying out in time to sow a viable crop this spring as the rain has continued almost without relief until mid April. A great many of those fields will need more than a year to recover their productivity, one option would be to plant a summer fallow of mixed flowering species, and hope for an opportunity to sow a crop in the autumn, otherwise leave well alone until spring next year, but who knows how much it will rain next winter? The financial consequences of all this are eye-watering.
A week in Herefordshire recently showed how bad things can look, every river brim full or overflowing, and so many fields under water or with water sitting on top of the soil. This particular erosion was on the River Lugg, not far from the infamous spot where a farmer with a digger was jailed for causing damage to the river bank. There were also many sheep with young lambs looking utterly miserable with little to eat. I really don’t understand why so many farmers persist in lambing their sheep so early, when there is little grass and miserable weather most years. The sight below should be a huge embarrassment to the farmer responsible.
For the nerds, our 7 month winter rainfall (Sept-March) exceeded the amount that normally falls in a whole year. (1090mm v 1040mm). Our soils are still very moist, and as the crops emerge, which we managed to finish sowing on Saturday 13th April, several weeks later than the optimum, we are trying to get them rolled, to push stones in and reduce slug grazing.
Moving on from the horror and stress of the weather and trying to get crops sown, our cows have been pumping calves out steadily for the last few weeks, all of our 60 cows have now calved, and as of just last week are enjoying fresh grass outside. We couldn’t risk them going out earlier and turning fields to mud before enough grass has grown to sustain them. The tiny flock of ewes are not due to lamb, until mid May, just in time to entertain a number of school visits booked for this term.
Several Durweston Primary classes visited the farm last term, and it’s great to see them feature in the school newsletter, the lad hugging the sheep is a classic pic, the ewes were so fluffy, their wool is so clean after all the rain, and luckily on this occasion they were lovely and dry. The school logo already has a significant agricultural influence…….
Our mid Stour Valley Cluster group has met several times over the winter, in January we enjoyed a technical session with soil specialist from Devon, Andrew Sincock. He talked muck, soil, cover crops and compost, and then we trudged out into a damp field to look at grazed cover crop and then some very cold and wet looking compost windrows. Andrew had shown us a curious graph which is supposed to tell us all we need to know in order to get compost right. If you can understand this you are cleverer than me.
Our own composting efforts had worked well earlier last year, we made and spread all the muck-based batches successfully before sowing this winter’s cover crops, but the compost rows that were only built in the autumn, using straw, horse manure, and material cut from our flower margins, didn’t contain enough nitrogen to get the composting process going before winter. We are about to liven up the windrows with fresh muck from the cow shed, then get the turner going to start it up again. We need it to reach 70 degrees temperature, to kill weed seeds and to encourage the right kind of organisms in the compost.
A couple of weeks ago Claire our cluster group leader organised a bat walk, led by Jim Mulholland of the Vincent Wildlife Trust. He gave us a fascinating talk with slides to begin with, focussing on the Greater Horseshoe bat which has a colony containing around 500 bats very local to the farm. We learnt many years ago that our land was highly likely to be providing foraging habitat for this endangered species, and we, as well as neighbouring farms, were encouraged by the Vincent Trust to manage our hedges to benefit the bats, and to refrain from using Ivermectin wormers on our cattle, this family of medicines kill the flies and beetles that feed on and live in cowpats, and which at the same time provide an essential food source for bats and many other species. From a low of just 2,200 individuals 30 years ago, the greater horseshoe bat UK population is now said to number around 10,000, thanks not least to the Vincent Trust, which has spent huge amounts of money purchasing buildings used as roosts, and then adapting them to suit bat requirements as closely as possible.
Jim took us to the roost, gave us bat detectors and encouraged us to stand quietly, watching the sky and listening for the GH bat’s unmistakeable sonar-like noise. Normally undetectable by the human ear, through the detectors they sound a bit like the Clangers, with a rising pitch phrase of 5 or 6 blips. The sound of approaching bats on the detectors made us look upwards to be treated to swoops of individuals leaving or returning to the roost, with the bats silhouetted against the dusky sky the combination of sound and vision was captivating. This link takes you to a leaflet about the GH bat, with some great pictures.
Interesting fact of the week; apparently the weight of all the creatures generated from the manure produced by a cow in a year is equivalent to 20% of the weight of the animal.
And a second one for good measure; the mites carried by dung beetles hop on and off the beetles as they travel from cowpat to cowpat, they spend much of their time consuming the fly eggs they find in the dung, therefore a good healthy cow pat which does not contain the residue of the most powerful wormers, can itself reduce the number of flies that it might well otherwise have produced. https://www.dungbeetlesforfarmers.co.uk/what-is-in-dung
For those keen to explore this subject further, here is an article (from which much of the last paragraph was borrowed), by Prof Ian Newton, who is described by my naturalist farmer friend Martin as our greatest ever ornithologist.
And finally for this episode, a developing situation is causing concern in various quarters in the county. Nutrient Neutrality is one feature of the Environment Act of 2021, the basic principles of which are enshrined in the act’s Environmental Principles Policy Statement. The five environmental principles set out in the act are:
the integration principle (that environmental protection be integrated into the making of policies);
the prevention principle;
the precautionary principle;
the rectification of environmental damage at source principle; and
the polluter pays principle
All of which make plenty of sense. But start digging deeper and it gets complicated.
The nutrient neutrality bit is where developers of new housing or commercial property on green field sites, have to lodge large sums of money with the local authority, or Natural England, which allegedly enables them to offset the likely future pollution produced from those new sites, and thus be awarded planning permission for the development. The six million dollar question is what happens to that money ? Well in two cases here in Dorset, the Dorset Wildlife Trust appears to have got its hands on some of it, and has used it to buy two farms, in order to rewild them. Now whatever you may think of rewilding, and I would need to write another 2000 words to do it justice here, my question is does the spending of let’s say £12 million for the two farms (total approx. 1000 acres) represent good value for public money ? The Trust will rewild 1000 acres (400 hectares) , which frankly will make little difference to the overall environmental condition of the Poole Harbour catchment (80,000ha) in which both farms sit, and where the Environment Agency (EA) has for the last five years been trying to persuade farmers to rein back on their nitrogen usage and manure production, in order to significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen reaching Poole harbour. The harbour is a globally important area for wildlife, and excessive nitrogen causes algal blooms which can starve the water of oxygen, and consequently seriously harm water dwelling species. So far the EA has worked with a large number of farmers in the catchment, and they have formed the Poole Harbour Nutrient Management Scheme, however it has become mired in difficulty due to the EA’s inability to devise an effective computer model that farmers can use to calculate their N leaching risk. (The now infamous nitrate leaching tool). The EA claims to be strapped for cash, and hence does not have the resources to invest in a programme sophisticated enough to provide the information required. It strikes me that this is exactly the kind of thing that the Nutrient neutrality money should be spent on, it could have a hugely beneficial effect through persuading farmers to reduce their riskier activities, over a very wide area, not just the 400ha that DWT are trumpeting as a huge environmental gain. Cynics might say vanity project.
£12 million could go a very long way in persuading farmers over a very wide area to farm in a more environmentally friendly way. In a nutshell, it’s land sparing versus land sharing, and I know which I favour.
If anyone can shed further light on what happens to NN money in different areas of the country, please feel free to illuminate those like me who find it all a bit mysterious right now, in the comment box below
From DWT’s website:
“We are delighted to be partnering with Dorset Wildlife Trust and others in this significant project which has the potential to substantially boost nature’s recovery in this part of Dorset. This is a great example of thinking creatively and bringing partners and different types of funding together. A large proportion of the funding is from Natural England’s nutrient mitigation scheme, meaning this work will offset the nutrient impact of much needed housing elsewhere in the Poole harbour catchment. While crucially playing its part in creating a beautiful landscape for people to come and enjoy for many years to come.”
Rachel Williams, Deputy Director – Natural England
We have done a bit more hedge coppicing this winter, admittedly it looks pretty drastic, but by the time we have filled in the gaps, and the stumps have sprouted new growth, we will end up with a much healthier hedge, with a thick bottom and lots of growth which can provide shelter for nests and fledglings. We hired a man and machine for the day to chip up all the brush wood, the chipper is huge and can munch it up faster than the operator can feed it with his long armed grab. We will use the wood chip in the cow shed next winter, to give the straw bedding a good base, and to mulch new hedge and trees around the farm. Fencing it in is now high on the list of ongoing work, to prevent deer and our livestock eating the new growth. Gary has been down there this week getting posts knocked in with Brendan, and will get the wire up in no time with our fencing machine and electric staple gun, (see last issue).
It’s time to get the wool off the ewes, a couple of weeks before they lamb. Newly learnt lessons with a Kiwi shearing gang have meant the shearing can be done in house once again.
Turnip seed coming along nicely for next winter’s cover crops, along with phacelia, clover, linseed and radish, with a few more about to be sown, such as buckwheat, vetch and camelina.
Mr Red enjoying the company of 11 heifers, replacements for the herd for next year, and the cowslips.
