The View from the Hill

The Knoll is just the best field for views and photographs, especially on a sunny day.  This year the field was blessed with a surprisingly lovely spring oat crop from one side to the other, the bicrop beans had come to very little in the drought, so the few that survived remained safely hidden out of sight below the oat canopy.  The tragic thing about oats is that they rarely fetch the price they deserve, always below wheat and barley, and the UK oat market is generally feast or famine, it’s a relatively small market, so is easily oversupplied and then the price plummets.  This year there is a large carry over of good quality oats nationally, from last year, which also depresses the market. 

Enough gloom for now, let’s just enjoy the view across Durweston and Stourpaine with Hod Hill rising up behind (top left), and the Hambledon Hill yew wood just sneaking into the top left corner of the picture.  A little to the right, one of the highest points in Dorset is Wyn Green.  Everyone on the farm here enjoys working on the Knoll, there is so much to look at apart from just the machine you are supposed to be minding, the Stour valley is stretched out before you, an ancient corridor of communication, comprising river, road, and for a short 100 years, rail, now superceded by bicycle rubber on this stretch, then the hills and woods beyond, stretching upwards and northwards into the Cranborne chase, it’s a spectacular spot.  The combine looks tiny from this height, but knowing its real size gives you a clue as to the scale of the landscape.

Will at the helm, the combine here is demonstrating its self-levelling ability.  This is a John Deere speciality, other manufacturers use different systems in an attempt to replicate this true levelling effect, such as by cleverly shaking the sieves so they throw the grain uphill to utilise the whole cleaning area.  An essential component of the combine’s thrashing system is to be able to separate the seed from the chaff, and if you can imagine using a sieve on an angle, the grain will simply fall to the lower side, reducing efficiency hugely.  The whole body staying level allows the grain and trash to spread across the whole thrashing system, this allows even distribution of the flow of cleaning air.  Not only this, but it is far more comfortable for the driver than a fixed chassis machine.  It is old technology now, we bought our first self-levelling combine in 1994, and we are now on the 4^th one since then, each one slightly larger than the previous, but we would not be without the self-levelling.  It is not available for combines on tracks, because the system relies on the ability of the machine to roll on the tyres as it changes angle, and flat tracks can’t do this.  Their advantages of lower ground pressure and superior grip on steep land do not in our estimation outweigh the ability to not spill your tea.

In the 2 weeks since it started raining we have at last seen over 5 inches of rainfall, it would be easy to think everything is fine and dandy on the weather front.  The rainfall figures for the individual months of 2025 do not immediately convey the seriousness of this summer’s drought.  The rainfall total for 1^st March-July 31^st this year was the driest we have ever recorded here, 161mm, half of the average for the same period over the last 40 years.  The issue has been the prolonged period with only intermittent bursts of rain which did not come to a great deal.  And this, following 18 months of well above average rain, has been too much for many soils across the country to deal with.  The running annual total of 1061mm at the end of August is not particularly low, and only when last autumn’s very high numbers drop off the 12 month chart might we see a truer reflection of how dry it has been.  Unless of course, we end up with another wet autumn.  Chances anyone??

Here are our in-calf heifers tucking into some of our valuable winter hay supply, two groups have been munching through this, while the other groups survive on meagre pickings across the herbal leys, which seem more tolerant of drought than the shrivelled permanent pastures, which give up all too quickly.

One last point on rainfall.  When someone asks whether I believe the climate is changing, I reply that I feel I cannot comment on something that needs measuring in centuries if not millennia.  Whereas the evidence of change in rainfall patterns in particular, over recent decades, does merit comment.  And if this is because of changes to the gulf stream and El Nino as a result of human activity, the burning of wood and fossil fuels in particular, then it is probably sensible to listen to the experts, and act accordingly.  Sad to say there seems little chance of this happening any time soon.  Anyway, this little chart shows that over the three chunks of 12 years that make up most of our rain recording period since the mid 80s, average annual rainfall in our corner of Dorset has indeed increased, by 12.5 percent over the 36 years.  One could argue about how best to calculate this, but whichever way you look at it, that is a significant increase.

One batch of phacelia, when harvested a few weeks ago, contained quite a lot of green Fathen seed (some know it by the name Goosefoot).  So we had to get it dry before we could clean it.  Ambient air being as warm as it was at the time, this arrangement (above) did a fine job of drying it all out, and preventing overheating.  We were then able to clean it over our old Rutherford cleaner and remove the largest part of the Fathen. 

Smaller seed lots, destined for sowing in cover crop mixes, have been run over our newest purchase, a mini cleaner, which although quite slow, does a very useful job.  A couple of weeks ago we harvested a small plot of what was supposed to be Fenugreek seed, which produced rather more Fathen than Fenugreek in the combine tank.  As we only had less than half a ton we ran it over the cleaner before drying, and did a creditable job.  Easier than the Phacelia because the seed size difference was greater. We ended up with only around 50 kg of fenugreek, not really a paying proposition.

The early finish to harvest this year has enabled us to get on with various other jobs, such as laying on the water supply to new areas of herbal ley, this has involved laying out hundreds of yards of water pipe, and positioning of water troughs so they can serve as large an area of grazing as possible.  Brendan has been busy with this, and it was time to construct a gadget to make the job a little easier.  Unrolling and rolling up water pipe is quite a challenge, especially if you don’t manage to expel all the water first.  The outer wheel is removable, for easy insertion or removal of rolls of pipe.

A trip to the County show at Dorchester at the weekend (Sat 7^th) was enjoyable as always, and the weather was kind.  Tom Bradshaw (NFU National President) was present, and in the NFU tent delivered a pretty sobering assessment of many issues facing agriculture currently.  Not least the sudden and unexpected replacement of Steve Reid last week, as Secretary of State at Defra, with the rather less well known Emma Reynolds, formerly Economic secretary to the treasury.  Another in a long line of Defra secretaries to be inducted into the wonderful world of landscape and agriculture.  Tom had developed a strong working relationship with Mr Reid, which he pointed out is of huge value, even when many areas of difference exist between parties, it is to be hoped that the same can be achieved with the new incumbent.  Her origins lie in the countryside so let us be optimistic that she might at least be able to approach the new job with some feeling for the rural.  There are some huge issues for her to get to grips with, number one being DEFRA itself, which due to the incompetence of the last government, coupled with the incompetence of the new one, has made an utter hash of the budgetary controls required to get the new environmental schemes working fairly and properly.  Some stories are breathtaking, for example where some farmers are allegedly receiving 4 times as much on payments from SFI than they were from the old BPS system.  No wonder Defra ran out of money.  They still won’t come clean on how much money has been allocated to various SFI iterations, to ‘Capital works’ projects, and to Landscape Recovery projects (rumoured to be very expensive) etc.

It seems that the ‘wonderful’ new payments of public money for public goods, really were too good to be true.  If this isn’t sorted out PDQ there are going to be very unfortunate consequences.  Tom told us that there are over 5000 farmers coming out of their 5 year Countryside stewardship schemes this autumn, and right now there is nothing for them to re-apply for.  We ourselves will be in the same boat in 2 years’ time.  What are these farmers supposed to do with the longer term options that they committed to, plough them up? 

In our case we have 75 ha of flowery field margins, which together with the hedge and a neighbouring field margin can form a 15 or 16 metre wide wildlife corridor between fields.  It would be a travesty to cultivate and crop this back to the hedge.  There is also arable reversion, where we sowed genetically appropriate seed stock into a small stony arable field, it is now a haven for downland flowers, insects, birds and small mammals, along with grazing animals, which don’t stay there very long as it is not particularly productive in modern ‘productive agriculture’ terms.  Without the environmental payments we simply cannot afford to farm like this, there is rent and a load of other bills to pay.

We desperately need the next phase of SFI to be announced, and some consistency and continuity applied to agricultural policy. Did anyone mention food……?

After an hour of intense politicking, a return to the Fabulous Food and Farming area soon restored the spirits. The rest of the author’s day was spent helping out at this educational corner of the show site, where a keen band of volunteers demonstrate all kinds of farming, food and environmentally related activities.  There was a huge sow with her six piglets lying in one corner of the tent, a three wheeled vintage tractor grinding wheat outside, numerous outsized jigsaw puzzles, newly constructed by the ever creative Martin family, to solve, a Dike and Son full sized cow to milk, and crop, fermentation and bakery displays.  The tent was busy all day, entertaining children and adults of all ages.

The very neat and impressive giant sized double layer puzzle of a combine and its inner workings, created by the ever resourceful Martins Deverel Farm family. There is a layer of green guards that go on top of this layer, the whole thing attracted a good deal of attention all day.

Gary pushing on with sowing cover crop into dust, using the seeder mounted on Heva discs. It looks a lot greener now.

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Saturday 12^th July 2025.  Harvest started this week, with the next generation in charge. They’ve romped through the winter barley, followed by a nibble at the OSR last night, and are pressing on with it today, in the boiling sun. Trying to catch it before moistures fall too low and seed is lost through shatter.

Some of our shiny 2 year old beefies, slowly basting in the sunshine, this was several weeks ago when fields were still green.  They have been gobbling up the grass on the meadows, which was barely keeping up with them as it has been so dry.  Thank goodness for the soaking we received at the end of the first week of June, which briefly prolonged the grass, but wasn’t in time to make much difference to the winter barley. A rather disappointing below average yield, having looked great throughout the season, not troubled much by disease as it has been so dry.  The wheat suddenly took a turn towards harvest about 10 days ago, and won’t be long before needing cutting, we rarely cut wheat in July here, but it looks like a dead cert this year. Again not too troubled by disease, but we fear for the drought effect. 

Farmers take to the water –

Our farmer cluster group at last achieved its long hoped-for aim, of paddling a stretch of the Stour, on a beautiful Monday evening in early June.  We put in at Bere Marsh farm, Shillingstone, where the Countryside Restoration Trust team had very kindly cut us a nettle-free path to the water.  Simon Jones, our intrepid leader for the evening, pushed the boat out so to speak, with Bryanston School where he is i/c canoeing, having obtained 6 Canadian style canoes, plus buoyancy aids, and laid out the plan for the next few hours.  After such a long period without rain, we didn’t really know what to expect at the waterline, would we actually get anywhere at all, was there a hope of reaching the boathouse back at Bryanston before dark?  Reeds, trees and weirs can conspire to frustrate the casual paddler, especially in such a year as this.  Sure enough, once we’d made it under Hayward’s Bridge, we were at once ensnared in reeds, which, for those not familiar with such things, was quite a struggle.  The first couple of kilometres were quite taxing, many reeds and seriously overhanging or fallen trees made the going pretty tough, at times a couple of us had to get out in the admittedly quite shallow water, to help the boats manoeuvre through, around, over or under a variety of obstructions.  And yes, we were quite nervous of swans too, we passed at least 6 at different points, luckily we managed to sneak past them all without any aggression being shown.  We only saw one cygnet, which seemed a little disappointing, and one swan was perched regally upon a beautiful island nest.

We had a few experts along with us, and the general feeling was that although shade is a good thing for a river, to encourage the shier aquatic creatures, perhaps one could have too much of a good thing.  Some trees were overhanging the water by at least 30 ft.
It is hard to overcome the strong impression that the Stour is little more than a series of near stagnant ponds, with a relatively small amount of current running over the weirs, and through the woody and weedy obstructions. It was ominous passing the various sewage plant outflows along the way, but fortunately no smell or even remotely coloured water there.  The river water seemed remarkably clean throughout the trip, something to do perhaps with the lack of rain, which in heavier downpours carries a lot of debris into the river, from roads, farmland and the river’s banks where they have been trampled by livestock, who should most definitely not be allowed to enter the river, haven’t you seen what comes out of the rear end of a cow, with absolutely no warning?  There is funding available for fencing to keep livestock out of rivers.

Open Farm Sunday – June 8th

A day spent as a tour guide on the farm tour trailers at Rawston Farm on Open Farm Sunday was as informative as it was exhausting.  The Cossins family threw open their farm gates to over 3000 visitors, and offered numerous rural and food attractions on a fresh sunny day, perfect in fact.

The team of drivers and guides with 4 tractors and trailers entertained over 1220 people between 10.30 and 4.30 pm, and we had to find answers for a good many questions from our guests, the ones about dairy farming being a particular challenge for this farmer, especially when it comes to trying to explain the notion of sexed semen.  How is it that all the calves in this field are Holstein Friesian heifers, and there are barely any bull calves? 

Sexed semen is a thing, it isn’t appropriate on our rather old fashioned farm, where we use reliable real bulls with our cows, rather than long rubber gloves and huge syringes.  High yielding dairy cows are nowadays artificially inseminated with semen that has been sorted for females, and it is around 90% successful.  Before this was possible, half of all calves born would be bull calves, which from the Holstein Friesian breed are not very good at producing meat, bred as they have been for optimal milk production over many generations.  This resulted in a supply of low quality beef entering the food chain, which provided poor rewards for the farmer, and disappointed consumers.  When using sexed semen on the best cows, enough herd replacement heifers can be planned for from the best cows, and then the rest can be inseminated from beef breeds, therefore producing a much better shaped animal for meat production.  It sounds like a win all round, with no serious downside other than the presumed extra cost, which should be recoupable later.

How is sexed semen processed? When processing semen, the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ chromosomes are separated by determining their size or DNA content. A laser is used to reduce the percentage of ‘Y’ chromosomes present in the batch of semen. It is possible that some male chromosomes will remain, but the chances will be much slimmer after being processed.  Information from Genus.

Back to the old-fashioned farm –

This picture from last year is one of our herbal ley fields, being enjoyed by one of the groups of cows and calves, also Theo the bull, head down mid picture.  The reason for showing this again is to help explain how difficult it is to marry the soil improving value of 3 or 4 years of grazed herbal ley, to the successful practical return of the field to the arable rotation.

The mixture of multiple species of grass, legumes and other species in the herbal ley provides a healthy diet for the cows, a vital disease and weed break for the arable crops, a fertility boost from the grazing and manuring of the cows, as well as the fixing of free nitrogen by the legumes, which are all pluses.  The difficult bit comes when terminating the ley so that a cash crop can be sown and grown.  Winter wheat would be the potentially best paying option, sown in the autumn, which we tried the last time we came to the end of a ley, but the wheat crop was hammered by leatherjackets (the larva of the crane fly, or daddy longlegs).  This pest loves to lay its eggs in grass fields.  The larvae hatch in early spring, and munch away on the grass below the surface, barely noticed because the well-established grass is growing quite fast.  When this happens in wheat you get large bare patches, which are annoying, and embarrassing especially when your farming neighbours can see them.

Some of those neighbours might suggest that was bound to happen because we insist on direct drilling our crops, but it’s the modern way isn’t it?  Less disturbance of the soil is high up the list of regenerative farming preferences, there’s less damage to soil structure, less oxidation of organic matter, less leaching of nitrate into water etc etc.  One thing cultivation of the soil, dare I say it, even ploughing, can bring however, is to expose those pesky leatherjackets to the air, where they can be feasted on by our feathered friends, especially seagulls, who can smell freshly turned soil from miles away.  They will also take worms though, which is definitely a bad thing, and one of the many reasons why we abandoned the plough more than 20 years ago.

We conducted an extensive debate in the farm office early in the spring, to decide how best to transfer Lower Down field back to arable:

Decision 1: Spring or autumn sowing?

Decision 2: Which crop?

Decision 3: How to sow?

There are many options, too tedious to list here, so I will cut to the chase.  The answer to No 1 was spring, this gives us the chance to leave the cows outside longer in the autumn, without the usual worry about damaging the pasture during wet weather, seeing as we were going to destroy it anyway.

Number 2 was trickier, a spring sown wheat or barley crop would risk squandering some of the break effect, but would not have the potential of an autumn sown crop, however any cereal crop would be at risk from leatherjackets, even if sown in the spring.  A non-cereal might be better, peas are no good here as it’s too stony, linseed is generally a loser, spring rape even worse.  This leaves us with beans, but they were awful last time we grew them in this field. Ok, how about oats, maybe mixed with a few beans?  That worked quite well last year, and if we grow it under the rules of the new SFI payment for low input cereal crops it might even make a profit.  Better make sure we apply for the payment in good time. *see previous broadcast about SFI car crash.

Here are the rules for AHW10: Low input harvested cereal crop:

Duration: 3 years

How much you’ll be paid: £354 per hectare (ha) per year (generous we thought)

Action’s aim: This action’s aim is that there’s a low input, open-structured cereal crop growing: • in strips or plots • during the spring and summer months until it’s harvested

The purpose of this is to: • enable wildflower species to grow within the crop • provide summer foraging sites for declining and localised farmland birds, such as yellowhammer and reed bunting • provide habitat for skylarks, farmland wildlife and pollinator species

(NB we sowed the crop, but the scheme closed a few days later, BEFORE we had pressed GO on the application form. Many farmers have been caught out by this non-sensical demolition of farmer confidence in “schemes”)

That just left us with a decision to make on how to establish the oats/beans bicrop.  To sow two crops together we need to use the Sky drill.  But hold on, the oats are a cereal, won’t they suffer from leatherjacket damage like the wheat did last time?  Shouldn’t we at least consider some cultivation? The problem here would be that the birds will turn over the lumps of turf as soon as sowing and rolling is done, leaving an open seedbed, vulnerable to drying out, and exposing seeds. Is this where the plough might have a place, it would bury the turf completely…?

The seed mix was sown direct into the remains of the herbal ley after spraying off with glyphosate, and allowing it to die off and go brown.  This way the drill should be able to cut though the dead turf and put the seeds in the right place.

In the event, the dry season has not been kind to the beans, the oats have done well, but have struggled with competition from some of the herbal elements of the ley, which did not respond well to the glyphosate. Being a bicrop, our options for in-crop weed control were limited. Watch this space for how we do it next time a ley has to come up. Congratulations if you not a farmer and have managed to get this far !

For my own benefit, here is a picture of our plough, last seen at work back in 2001, because it is quite possible we may have to try to find it before we need to terminate the next ley ground, or even to rescue Lower Down before sowing time in the autumn.

A moth interlude –

To a grain meeting –

Richard Wright, head grain trader from Bartholomews Agri Foods based in Sussex, treated around 30 local farmers to breakfast at the Hall and Woodhouse brewery, to bring us up to date with grain markets, sadly he didn’t bring a great deal of good news, although having stoked us up with the full english, we couldn’t blame him. This graph shows how for the last 25 years, grain consumption has matched production. This may seem obvious, clearly consumption cannot go beyond production, however one should note that in spite of a strong growth trend for production, consumption nearly always rises to meet it. And yet – prices in Europe and most of the world languish at the lower end of recent spreads, frankly at levels that do not offer a profitable outcome for farmers, especially relevant now that our own government has violently cut off the tapered winding down of the Basic Payment Scheme, which for decades has compensated farmers for low grain prices. Removal of the SFI is something of a double whammy, as I have said here before, so the lost likely outcome is a reduction in environmental commitments by farmers. Pretty disastrous.

And finally –

A packed sale room on Straw sale day saw prices rise to near record levels. Over 8000 acres of straw from across neighbouring counties went under Greg Ridout’s hammer in a couple of hours, as buyers sought to secure supply in a season suspected to be significantly lower yielding than usual. A buoyant milk price and a lively livestock trade may have helped out the cereal growers on this occasion.

Dorset Council are funding the development of an AI assisted robot to address ragwort control, here is Tim using a 360 degree camera to collect images to train the robot with.

Very pleased to catch three species of butterfly in one shot. This margin, and many others, heaving with butterflies in this bright, dry (but too hot) weather. They seem to particularly love the Scabious.

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The long walk home, for our huge flock, after shearing on Sunday morning.  It is fair enough to ask, why are they not all shorn?  Well Mike our shearer suffered a back twinge, and felt it was too risky to carry on, and seeing as it was only 2 wethers and Ronnie the ram remaining, there was no real urgency.  We were very keen to get the 11 ewes clipped seeing as the weather was seriously warming up, and lambing just around the corner, the boys could wait.  It seems to happen every year, that the first ewe lambs the day after shearing, and sure enough, on Monday morning Conker popped out her 3 lambs.  Triplets are always tricky to rear, seeing as 3 onto 2 (teats) doesn’t go, the stronger two will always pinch most of the milk to the detriment of the third.  So after the colostrum had been shared, the prettiest one was taken away and she has been pampered with 4 feeds a day, and lots of attention from our young neighbours. 

We saw 3 more ewes lamb in the next two days, and right now the score is 8 ewe lambs and one boy.

For the more professionally minded reader, who might be tempted to cock a sneer at the miniscule flock size, I should point out that our sheep enterprise was long ago relegated to hobby status, after decades of trying to find a way to make a profit out of sheep farming, and failing over and over again.  The only reason for their presence on the farm now is purely as entertainment for our school visitors, and as teaching aids.  Being tame it is very easy to take a class of thirty children into the field where the sheep will get up close and greedy, in search of toast.  It is a fair enough transaction, some crunchy food in exchange for top quality entertainment, the children can feel the wool, discuss the chewing of cud, and how many lambs might they be carrying.  Some even get hugged.

Last week Will sowed the spring section of our cover crop seed supply for next season.  Alongside the lovely bright turnip plot he has sown buckwheat, spring vetch, daikon radish and camelina.  On the far side of the turnips is a lively plot of winter vetch, and beyond that, over the hedge, is a patch of winter sown phacelia, which today is almost fully in flower, proving very popular with the bees which have just arrived on the farm from the cherry fields of Kent.  This brings us up to around 40 hives in different locations across the farm.  Robert Hogben, from Dorchester, has been bringing his bees here for many years, and up to around 20 hives live here all year round.  He was keen that they are close to the beans.  This reminds me that after careful observation in the past, I doubt the value to the farmer of bees in the bean crop, I have watched as they stick their proboscis through the side of the flower tube directly into the drops of nectar, rather than fight their way into the flower from the top, therefore they do not collect any pollen with which to fertilise the next flower they visit, do not pass go, and do not collect £200.  There could be a risk that the drilled hole would actually cause the flower to abort, though I don’t have the heart to mention this to Robert.  I would however be very grateful to anyone who could shed some (scientifically rigorous) light on this little matter.

These handsome beasties have had to be isolated from the rest of our herd.  They are the unfortunate recipients of an ‘inconclusive’ test result at our TB test at the end of March.  This is a serious blow, as we now have to be closed until we test clear.  The category ‘inconclusive reactor’ (IR) seems to me to be utterly useless.  Either our animals have been exposed to the TB organism, or they have not.  As I understand it, having spoken to many vets about it, an animal reacts to the TB test vaccine if it has been exposed to TB, full stop.  However DEFRA, through its agency APHA, the Animal and Plant Health Agency, deems that the reaction lump has to be above a certain size in mm in order to be classified as a reactor, in other words, so that they will take it away and compensate the farmer for the loss of the animal.  Between ‘reactor’, and ‘clear’, there is this murky category of ‘inconclusive’, which has its own unique set of associated rules.  An inconclusive animal gets a second chance at the test, 60 days later.  If it is inconclusive again, it becomes a full reactor and will be taken by APHA. If clear it can return to the herd, but it will never lose the label that says it was once an inconclusive, and its presence in the herd prevents the farmer from reaching CHKS status for the herd, which can entitle him or her to extend the period between regular TB tests from 6 months to one year, which is hugely helpful.  The only way to get out of this situation is therefore to dispose of the animal as soon as possible, it can legally go for slaughter, but if it’s a beef animal may well not be fit (big enough), so the farmer loses out to a lower price than if he could have kept the animal until fully grown.  Things are a lot more complicated for dairy farmers, the IR may be carrying a calf, and you will be able to understand the challenging decision of whether to keep the cow until the calf is born, or to sell her on as quickly as possible to reduce the chance of infection spreading to other cows.  An inconclusive has to be isolated from the rest of the herd until it can be tested again.
Underpinning all this frustration is the very poor standard of the skin test used for regular TB testing, relying on the measuring of lumps.

The TB skin test is the common name for the Single Intradermal Comparative Cervical Tuberculin (SICCT) test. This skin test is regarded as the definitive indicator of infection by the bacterium that causes TB in cattle – Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis). It is the required test in the EU and has proved to be a reliable tool worldwide.

Two types of tuberculin, one made from killed Mycobacterium bovis and the other from killed Mycobacterium avium, ( a bird related bacteria) are injected into the skin on the side of the neck, approx. 3 inches apart.  The animal is then examined 3 days later, if the bovine lump is larger than the bird lump, then it has reacted.  The reason for the bird related vaccine is so as to account for background levels of infection in the local environment.  It is the difference in size of lumps which is all important.

It is instructive to recall the days of the TB cull, which controversially involved the catching and dispatching of badgers, a known vector of bovine TB.  In Dorset the 5-7 year cull periods in different parts of the county resulted in reductions in numbers of new TB outbreaks of more than 50%. This has taught us 2 main things, 1) Reducing badger numbers can reduce TB in cattle, and 2) Reducing badger numbers will never eradicate TB, it could only ever be one of a number of tools in the box, and only of any justifiable use if we are a great deal more rigorous in removing TB from cattle herds than we are currently.  After many years of TB levels rapidly expanding, it is now everywhere, deeply embedded and all too often, with current testing methods, lying undetected and infectious in many herds.  Utterly depressing, with insufficient vigour being put into properly dealing with the problem.

A number of things are needed:

Better testing

Better on farm hygiene (keeping cows and badgers apart, more rigorous health screening of cattle).

A TB vaccine, which can be distinguished from actual TB in animals

An acknowledgement that TB is in the wild deer population and doing something about it

Allow for badger culling in areas where TB seems endemic.

I know of one large dairy farm where any animals that show the slightest reaction to the skin test are taken out, in other words a zero tolerance policy.  There is a lot to commend this approach, although it seems costly to the farmer, in the long term it is probably the cheapest and most effective.

We may soon be starting to moan about the lack of rainfall. After very many months moaning about too much rain. The 21 months to the end of March this year showed a consistent running annual total above 1200mm, which is significantly higher than our long term average rainfall of 1050mm. Breaking down the 36 years of records into 12 year chunks, shows a pattern of increasing rainfall.

• Annual averages:
• 12 yrs 1988-2000  992mm, 40in
• 12 yrs 2000-12     1045mm, 42in
• 12 yrs 2012-24     1122mm, 45in

Anyway, rather than moan, it would seem miserable not to celebrate the fabulous blossom we have seen everywhere over the last few weeks, from the moment the blackthorn burst into flower and the first cowslips which soon followed, then bluebells, wild garlic and other woodland flowers. Fruit trees and hawthorn have continued the theme, suggesting potential for the fruiting season, it has been reminiscent of 2020 when the awfulness of the pandemic was in some way balanced by a sunny and warm early spring.

As captured below by Alan Wicks, always a real treat to see what he finds around the farm.

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10 Years ago April 2015

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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 11^th 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.

Back to Jan-Feb 2025 post

The View from the Hill                                                                      

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.

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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.

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………

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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:

1. 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?
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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 30^th, 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Changes to national insurance which will raise the cost of employment particularly for businesses with larger workforces.
5. 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 intelligently here 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.

Back to Nov-Dec 2024

The View From the Hill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 21^st 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.

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……..

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sustainable-farming-incentive-scheme-expanded-offer-for-2024/sfi-scheme-information-expanded-offer-for-2024

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 18^th) 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.

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.

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.

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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:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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).

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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. 

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-south-west-homes-to-be-enabled-by-latest-nutrient-mitigation-scheme

Extract from Government announcement:

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

1. I would like to see the calculations which show how this 330 hectare farm could mitigate the potential pollution from 3700 homes? 
2. 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? 
3. How does the purchase of the farm demonstrate good value for public money, costing as it would have at least £10 million?
4. Should we be worried about Nutrient neutrality units being traded out of catchment?
5. 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.
6. 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:

1. Help water companies clean up
2. Help farmers learn new techniques to use fert and manure more efficiently, eg the NLT
3. Pay farmers to lay off any N or Muck application up to 200m from any waterway
4. 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.