FEATURE
FEATURED FARMER PHILIP ROWBOTTOM Philip Rowbottom, is a 3rd generation farmer arable farmer from West Yorkshire. Some of you may know him as @golfnshoot on Twitter, so it may not surprise you to learn he also owns Woolley Park Golf club and represents team GB in Clay shooting. Here he explains his transition over to Direct Drilling from a conventional plough-based system and how he’s already seeing the improvements across his farm. “The farm covers around 500 acres just south of Wakefield. Today we farm 300 acres, with the golf course covering the remainder. The diversification into the golf course was pivotal in how we farm today. Over breakfast one morning, way back in 1991, my father announced we should build a golf course. None of us played golf, or had any real interest in golf, but that's what we did and that's what we’ve done for the last 30 years. Built, operated and expanded the golf side of our business. Sport has always been part of my life; I’ve always been competitive. I got involved with the local shooting club, mainly as a way to get away from the farm for a few hours. As I improved, it became more and more competitive and I’ve been very lucky to represent the country, shooting clays around the world. The farm is still very much part of our business. Being right on the border of a livestock/arable region, we’ve traditionally sold all of our straw, it was becoming increasingly clear to me that our sandstone land needed something putting back. We needed to improve the organic matter, so we stopped selling it and began incorporating it. The change of legislation around disposal of domestic garden waste opened up an opportunity to access compost locally. Over winters we were able to bring 2000-3000 tonnes of compost onto the farm, over a period of five to six years. I knew we were beginning to see very subtle changes to our soils. Our soils are incredibly abrasive, you go ploughing on the wrong day and you can see the metal wear. Watching how
the industry was changing, min- till, zero cultivation, changes in weather patterns, wet seasons, I knew we needed to do something different. In 2020 I bought a subsoiler, we’d never had one on the farm, the wet autumn of 2019 and warm dry spring of 2020 baked our sandy soils, consequently, or wheat yields crumbled. We used the Phillip Watkins Tri-till to establish our oil seed rape crop in 2020, possibly our best yielding rape crop we’ve ever grown. Subconsciously, I knew I was going to do something differently. Technology has moved on, watching the farming press for a couple of years Direct Drills have moved forward from the Bettison DD we had here 50 years ago, I looked at a few different options, and without having a demo I decide that the Opico Sky drill offered me everything I needed from a Direct Drill. Aside from the benefits mentioned above another factor in the decision making was the looming reduction of the BPS payments, we’ve always done a bit of contracting, I saw an opportunity to be able to offer Direct Drilling service locally. It would be a way of filling that loss of the BPS, its first year has seen around 500 acres with the drill, the hope is to increase that acreage this autumn. In two seasons we’d gone from plough-based crop establishment, to min- till with the Phillip Watkins Tri-till to having an 4M Opico Sky Drill on farm for autumn 2021 and growing cover crops!
6 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
ISSUE 18 | JULY 2022
