MY NUFFIELD JOURNEY AND BEYOND
It's amazing how one book can change your life. For 2022 Nuffield Farming Scholar Emily Padfield, this one book was For the Love of Soil by Nicole Masters. Many describe having their 'eureka' moment whilst undertaking their Nuffield Scholarship. Although I am only at the start of my Nuffield journey (having undertaken only a few visits). I believe my 'epiphany' occurred before I had applied for my Scholarship. I was standing in the lambing shed in March 2021 (only just over a year ago), busily filling a syringe with Pen and Strep to inject all lambs at birth as we had had an outbreak of joint-ill in our early lambing bunch. I had also sourced a probiotic to then give to each lamb to replenish the gut bacteria I was busily killing with the injection.
At the same time, I was listening on Audible (other audio book providers are available) to 'For the Love of Soil' by Nicole Masters. The more I listened, the more I realised that what we were doing had some fundamental flaws. To each problem in my life, whether it be animal or crop health, financial, emotional or human health related, I had always looked for a solution, a cure, a 'quick fix'. What this book made me realise was that we were looking at everything the wrong way round. We needed to stop the problems happening in the first place, or at least understand why they were happening so we could try to prevent them happening at all. From that moment on, my partner Mark (whose family farm we work together) and I started realising there was a different path we wanted to follow. Never one to hang around (again one of my many flaws) I started to read everything I could about this 'new' way of doing things: Regenerative Farming. The more you read, the more you realise there is truth in the adage 'there's nothing new in farming'. Mark started remembering methods and ways his grandfather had used, the number of species he had on the farm before policy and economics governed farms to specialise 12 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
and expand numbers to become more efficient and profitable. He also remembered the plenitude of life that coexisted here before the use of artificial inputs. He recollected the masses of beetles and insects when combining in his old cab-less combine, seeing the grain teeming with life when unloading the auger. He recalled the health of the livestock without all the different products that are now sold to us at huge expense.
A NEW WAY OF THINKING The first step we took on our journey was to get regenerative advisor and fellow Nuffield Scholar Ben Taylor-Davies to come and have a chat with us on the farm. We outlined what we wanted to achieve, and it seemed to fit with his way of thinking too. We dug holes, took in-depth soil samples, applied lime and gypsum and bought a sward lifter in a bid to get our compacted clay soils in better health. We had re-introduced cattle five years ago by sourcing dairy beef heifers and steers, keeping the heifers we liked to establish a small suckler herd of 40 or so cows plus followers. Up until then, we had been purely sheep for several years, running 800 plus North Country Mule and Cheviot X ewes, lambing in late February indoors. We are permanent stock fenced on most of our acreage and field sizes are between 20 to 40 acres. Mark has always loathed electric fencing, so this was a major concern for me as I knew getting involved in strip grazing could cause friction. Since our change in policy, I have since sourced some semipermanent electric fencing from fellow regenerative grazier and Nuffield Scholar Alex Brewster at Powered Pasture and also invested in some geared reels for ease of subdividing fields into smaller paddocks. Due to a bit of restructuring to allow Mark's sons some land to start their own businesses on, we reduced sheep numbers to around 450 ewes suit our acreage and started rotational grazing with both sheep and cattle, with regular, if not daily moves.
ISSUE 18 | JULY 2022
