Don't knock it until you've tried it!

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As part of my day job as Head of Agriculture for Armstrong Watson, I am very lucky to be able to visit many farms of different types across the North of England and Southern Scotland. I have had the chance to experience and witness many diverse types of farming and techniques involved.

Some farmers may be reluctant or wary to change and adapt their farming methods for the future and look sceptically over the hedge at people doing different things. However, a number of the farm visits I've been fortunate to make recently, challenge that viewpoint and hence my title to this article.

As follows are two different examples of farms I have recently visited. Both are pushing forward and trying to do things that not only benefit the natural environment of their farm but allow them to keep farming as they wish and improve or maintain their bottom-line profits.

The first example is a 500-acre mixed arable farm in mid York’s, where the huge objective over the last seven years has been to improve the fertility, health and biology of the soil that the crops grow in and the cattle graze. This has been achieved by going down a ‘no till growing’ technique using a direct drill, conserving as much organic matter as possible and the addition of compost teas and other natural additives. The day I visited the results showed for themselves. There were some excellent wheat and oilseed rape crops waiting for the combine that had been grown with no fungicide sprays, and a low reliance on bought-in fertiliser, and looked as though they would achieve very respectable yields. Whilst these techniques may seem very modern and risky, the saving in input and machinery costs was dramatic, and is helping the farm improve financial results, allowing it to get through the challenges of the abolition of BPS.

The second example is a 900-acre upland grass farm in the Scottish borders that had traditionally kept a mixed herd of suckler cows. These were housed in cattle sheds for at least five months of the winter at large expense, which was making them hard to justify financially. Here they have adapted their system so that the cattle all graze on a paddock mob grazing system where they are split into three mobs over the spring and summer months and are given a fresh acre plot as they require every day, with each full cycle round the farm taking approximately two months to achieve. The advantage of this method is twofold, in that a higher number of cattle can be kept on a smaller space, and it also allows some of the drier more sheltered land to be left ungrazed all summer to build up grass stocks where the cattle can then be out wintered on hay bales which are put in place during the summer. This has allowed the farm to utilise the buildings for other purposes, to reduce costs of machinery and producing winter forage, which in-turn has had a dramatic impact on the bottom-line profit and business sustainability.

I am a farmer's son and I fully appreciate that every farm is different with its own set of circumstances such as altitude, soil type, weather patterns and ownership or rental details, but I would ask every farmer who is going through these challenging times to look at different techniques with an open mind as they could just work for you too.