FEATURE
FEATURED FARMER JULIAN GOLD Farm Facts FARM SIZE: 800 hectares MANPOWER: 3 FARM TYPE: Arable OTHER FARM TYPE INFORMATION: Arable with sheep that graze cover crops and permanent pasture TENURE: Owner occupied REGION: South East England RAINFALL: 679 mm ALTITUDE: 100 m above sea level SOIL: Highly alkaline, silty clay loam over chalk APPROACH: Regenerative agriculture KEY FARMING PRACTICES: Mulching Minimum Tillage Undersowing Diverse leys Companion crops Diversified rotation Integrated Pest Management
Soil monitoring Trap crops Agroforestry Biological control Direct drilling Habitat creation Leys
• Julian Gold is farm manager of 800 hectares of Hendred Estate in Oxfordshire on the edge of the Berkshire Downs. The farm typically has a high pH (8.2) silty clay loam over chalk soil and a 6-year rotation of oil seed rape (OSR), winter wheat, spring barley, spring or winter beans, winter wheat, winter barley or second wheat, then back to OSR. There is a small area of permanent pasture and a sheep flock graze the cover crops. • He talks about motivations - how he transitioned from "the industrial bandwagon" of piling inputs into crops, lots of fertilisers, lots of chemicals, and being part of the problem, to being part of the solution - and farming in a way that is less harmful to the environment and biodiversity. • He outlines his soil health and carbon capture strategy; explaining his primary aim is to grow big high yielding crops that are photosynthesising hard and to also grow cover crops wherever possible between winter and spring crops to try and keep root exudates. He tries to do reduced or no till (and direct drill) whenever he can - to minimise cultivations, and to return all the crop residues where possible. He also runs a 10m controlled traffic system which has reduced trafficking of the soil to 20%. • He describes his multi species cover crops, how he manages them (including using sheep to graze them), and how he manages straw residues. 6 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
• He also describes his trialling of biological methods of pest control to build ecological processes on the farm and reduce his input bill. He talks about his involvement with ASSIST (a large research project with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology looking at beneficial insects on-farm), where he has been growing flowering strips down the middle of fields (90m apart), and mentions some of the main benefits he has observed. • He refers to the ways in which he wants to build on reducing nitrogen (N) use; including using under stories of clovers and yellow trefoil, and companion cropping. • He talks about the impact of what consumers want on agroecological farming practices - and the importance of having a product you can get a premium for. • Finally, he describes his perfect vision of a farming system and how he would like to see his farm, or the way that he farms, develop in the future. “If UK agriculture is going to reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2040 (which is what the NFU wants to do), we can’t do that without reducing N fertiliser substantially.”
Interview with Julian Janie Caldbeck spoke with Julian Gold, farm manager of Hendred Estate in Oxfordshire, as part of the Agricology farmer profile and podcast series (recorded in July 2020)
Please could you introduce the farm - what you farm and your general farming system and overall approach? I manage the Hendred Estate which is about 800 hectares of farmable land, mainly combinable crops. We have a small area of permanent pasture and run a small sheep flock, we also graze on cover crops in the arable area, and we run a shoot for the Estate. The farm is on the edge of the Berkshire Downs, and it's very high pH soil; 8.2 silty clay loam over chalk. We’re in a bit of a rain shadow so we tend to have very dry springs and summers. We practice a six-year rotation at the moment, which I had thought was a nice fantastic, diverse wide rotation but I'm increasingly thinking it's needs to be way wider and way more diverse. We start with oilseed rape (OSR) and then it goes onto winter wheat, then spring barley, then spring or winter beans, back to winter wheat, and then winter barley or second wheat, and back to OSR. We do get flea beetle problems but not as bad as some people. The rotation seems quite wide and ecologically friendly, but I think that it needs to be much more diverse and much more random. At the moment we tend to work backwards from the grain storage - so I have big grain stores with big bays, they hold 1200 tonnes of crop each and I tend to have big blocks of set amounts of crop each year. But what I feel is that from an agroecological point of view, I need to plant crops in a random way to help confuse the pests and diseases, particularly the black grass. It really relies on us having much ISSUE 14 | JULY 2021
