THE FIGURES BEHIND THE REGENERATIVE VALUES Written by Tom Allen-Stevens Balbirnie Home Farms in Fife, Scotland, has been on a regenerative agriculture journey, testing aspects of this within its role as an AHDB Strategic Cereal Farm. A tour of the estate highlights its natural capital assets, helping to determine its carbon baseline and the opportunities to develop.
Standing at the edge of the 20ha field, you can see how the electric fencing has divided it into ‘paddocks’. David Aglen explains that the sheep are rotated around – never kept too long on each individual paddock, so that the field is ‘mob-grazed’. It seems a sensible way forward for temporary grass. “Oh no, this isn’t temporary grass, this is winter wheat,” remarks David. “I’m hoping these lambs will ensure we won’t have to apply a T1 fungicide or growth regulator, and also give the crop its early season nutrition and a fertility boost.” Suddenly the pale green of the closest paddock takes on an entirely different complexion. It’s early March on Balbirnie Home Farms, just north
of Glenrothes in Fife, Scotland. The lambs have recently been moved to the next-door paddock, and your instinct is to worry whether the remains of the winter wheat they left behind will ever recover. A closer inspection reveals fresh, green shoots are already coming through. The crop has lost most of its above-ground winter biomass, but this has passed through the sheep and been deposited back on the light, loam soils that lie just over 100m above sea level. It’s a practice that meets the regenerative agriculture system the farm has taken on, although David admits he’s not sure yet of the final effect on yield, nor whether the area was grazed for the optimum time. Moving to the largely untouched paddock next door, he points out the lower leaves, carrying a fair amount of disease. “These were never going to contribute very much to yield, and would just be an extra cost in terms of the fungicide we’d have to apply,” he says. “What I’m interested to know, though, is the effect on the bottom line and not just financially. We’re
Wheat is mob-grazed by sheep towards the end of the winter, before spring growth gets underway.
26 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
keen to assess our carbon footprint – we want to work out our baseline and also the farm’s biodiversity score. Then we want to look at the effect of the practices we’re implementing, whether they help to capture carbon or lose it, and just how much we can sequester.”
While soil carbon stocks take a long time to build and can be destroyed very quickly, just one year of carrots in the rotation, seen here under straw, won’t put levels back to zero.
Balbirnie Farms has come on board with Sandy. This is software from Trinity AgTech that accurately assesses the carbon footprint, biodiversity and water quality of whole farm and all its enterprises on a field-by-field, cropby-crop basis (see panel). “It’s not just about the 800ha of arable cropping we have,” explains David. “We have 300ha in permanent pasture or temporary grass for our 200-head herd of suckler cows. There are also forage and cover crops, land let out for root and vegetable crops and 350ha of commercial forestry.” Heading back into the estate, you pass parts of this woodland that have been left badly damaged by Storm Arwen. Owned by the Balfour family since 1642, the tree planting on the estate has been nurtured by many past generations who have developed its diversity and value, with some much-prized ornamental and exotic specimens. Today, two thirds of the commercial woodland is Sitka spruce, while the remainder consists ISSUE 18 | JULY 2022
