The organic farm plan

The Organic Farm Plan is all about a working rotation to maintain and improve the soil’s fertility for healthy crops and animal nutrition and welfare, whilst doing our best for the land.

We run a clean grazing regime where the sheep graze a give area one year, and then swap with the cattle the following year. This ensures that the sheep and cows always graze land which has not had the same livestock on previously, completely breaking the parasitic worm burden and cycle on the land. (Therefore, neither the sheep nor the cattle require working).

The rotation is basically a minimum of 2 years fertility-building phase, with red or white clover. Nitrogen fixation by the clovers builds up nitrates organically, and these are absorbed into the soil ecosystem rather than being lost by leaching.

By grazing the clover leys, or 'conserving' (harvesting) silage for winter feed from the clover swards, we remove annual weeds such as black grass, charlock and wild oats. This then allows us to plough up the sward in September, planting one year of winter wheat for milling, a second year of spring wheat undersown with white or red clover, then back into a grazing cycle or to feed our chickens.

Variations of the rotation allow for longer term white clover for up to 5 years on areas of lower fertility, or more problematical weed infestations. These longer periods break the seeding cycles of problem plants like wild oats.

Winter beans are also grown after a single wheat crop to provide high protein animal feed. Beans are also nitrogen-fixing. Therefore, we are always building fertility and cleaning the land of weeds by crop competition.

Whenever we plough out our clover leys, we deliberately leave a 2m strip of clover and grass around the boundary of the field. This creates a field boundary preventing nettles, thistles, cleavers, and sterile brome from entering into the open wheat crops, whilst providing a diverse habitat for beneficial insects as parasitic wasps which can enter the cereal crops and control aphids.

We have established 72 kilometres of grass margins around our fields. Wild birds like Grey Partridge nest in these grassy field margins, and other ground nesting birds such as Lapwing, Skylark and Starling use the field edges a lot. Small mammals are attracted too, which in their turn provide food for predators such as owls, and other birds of prey.

We also plant strips of phacelia. The clovers and phacelia flower they attract a phenomenal amount of insect life which helps to fertilize the cereals and adds incredibly to the biodiversity of field. We have also established 43 acres of mixed broad-leaved woodland to date, with an additional 185 acres of permanent wild flower meadows and 24km of new hedgerows.