FEATURE
FARMER FOCUS
ROB RAVEN The phrase “Regenerative agriculture” is a relative newcomer to our collective vocabulary, and although it roughly describes the type of farming I attempt to practice, it is not a phrase that sits easily with me, as it is so vulnerable to being hijacked by special interest groups, and can mean very different things to different people. Rather than aspiring to any particular farming system, my strategy has always been about making the most resilient and de-risked business I can. Mine is a family farm of just under 700 acres, which has to support several householdsthis is no easy task and has always required a certain amount of lateral thinking. This strategy has led me on a circuitous path of logic to where I am now- managing, in one way or another, just under 10,000 acres of land and livestock which is all somewhere along what we now call “the regenerative journey”. The first step on this journey was, bizarrely enough, to facilitate a potato contracting enterprise we were running at the time. With staff and machinery tied up on potatoes for much of the year, managing the crops on our own heavy land became a challenge. Up until then we had been on a plough-based continuous wheat rotation on Beccles series clay (which famously goes from too wet to work, to too dry, in about five minutes). Frustrated with the endless hours of power harrowing, and seedbeds that were often either dried out clods or wet slop, we wanted an alternative. We had read about direct drilling and thought this could be the answer. We couldn’t justify buying a direct drill and there were no contractors around, so we decided to build one (pictured). It was a very modest attempt, but it did have narrow tines on 200m spacings, independent coulter depth control and hydraulically adjustable downforce on the press wheels. It was very effective and we pulled 4m with 100hp. We used this along with reduced cultivations, livestock integration and a more varied rotation while we learned how to make the system work, and before long we were direct drilling all the heavy land every year. With the reduced workload that direct drilling brought us, we suddenly found we had time
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to spare. We started to pick up contracting work with our direct drill, but it wasn’t up to a lot of roadwork, and since our confidence in direct drilling had grown and we could see an opportunity on the horizon, we invested in a “proper” disc direct drill. This gave us scope to plant on the green, become more adventurous with our cropping and cover cropping, and allowed us to take on more land with kit that was up to the job. We have since added to the fleet and now run disc and tine drills, as I believe there is need for both to make this system work! I also believe that lightweight drilling tractors are beneficial on our land type, so we run several smaller drills with low HP tractors on wide VF tyres.
As any reader of this magazine knows, the kit is only a very small part of the equation. We invested heavily in imported compost, set up muck for straw arrangements, and grew cover crops wherever possible to get some much-needed organic matter in the upper layers of our soils. Livestock were brought in over winter, to help manage over-zealous cover crops and turn them into an asset rather than a liability to following crops. The farm now looks (and behaves!) radically different from the power harrow days. The top three inches of the heavy land used to be tan-coloured clay that was either like concrete or plasticine. Now it is highly organic, black and tilthy, and can reliably be direct drilled autumn or spring. Ruts and wheelmarks are a distant memory. I used to live in fear of a wet autumn, but the last two years have filled me with confidence. In both 2019 and 2020 we received over 100mm of rain in the last week of September- I thought we were snookered, but was astonished to find that the disc drill could get going on heavy land just a few days later. I watched
ISSUE 14 | JULY 2021
