FEATURE
FEATURED FARMER JAKE FREESTONE Farm Manager at Overbury Farms The Farm Overbury Farms is an integrated part of Overbury Enterprises which has been in the same family for over 250 years. It is a mixed farm that produces a range of crops including wheat, barley, oilseed rape (OSR), pease, linseed and soya beans. We also let out certain areas of our farm to specialist growers who produce crops such as onions and peas. The farm also has a flock of 1,200 sheep and home-bred Texel Cross Mules. The ewes are a mixture of Mules, Aberfields and Lleyn crossed Romneys. All lamb is LEAF marque certified which is an environmental assurance system that recognises sustainably farmed produce. Produce and livestock are sold to high street supermarkets as well as local markets and food outlets. OSR is sold on to Unilever and our barley is harvested and sold to Molson Coors. Watch a video by scanning the QR Code opposite (recorded at an intercropping event) of Jake introducing the farm and talking about the importance of no till and cover cropping.
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Sustainability In Practice: Building soil fertility and reducing weeds through carefully planned rotations, no till, intercropping and cover crops The 6 year rotation at Overbury includes winter and spring barley, OSR, winter wheat, peas, linseed and soya beans. We have reintegrated livestock and now graze ley mixtures with home bred Texel, Abermax and SufTex lambs. This has the benefit of breaking weed lifecycles and also allowing the restorative periods in the rotation. The system has been no till since 2013 (on some trial blocks, most of the farm came in from July 2015), which has had a very noticeable impact on soil quality, infiltration and biology - evidenced by some giant worms that we have found here lately! On most occasions we leave some straw and use mollasses and humates to help break it down. I don’t use seed treatments as the effect on mychorrhizzae is compromising the essential life in the soil, and instead have farm-saved untreated seed (seed is tested for fusarium mainly and if clean enough it’s not dressed). If the soil is going to be uncovered for more than 5 weeks, I will put in a cover crop. In monoculture there is no room for genetic variation. A field of wheat is full of genetically identical plants and everything is vulnerable to the same pests and diseases. In a crop mixture you can guarantee that something will grow regardless of what conditions come your way. But it is not so much what happens above ground as below. Speaking to fellow Nuffield Scholar Andy Howard, I was inspired to give companion cropping a try...
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Agricultural Contractors & No-Tillage Specialists
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Our most common species mixture (or ‘plant team’) is OSR, vetch and buckwheat. We have 4 hoppers on the Cross Slot drill (one also for slug pellets) and drill it at the same depth in the autumn - seed rates of approx. 7kg buckwheat, 2.5kg OSR and 13.5kg vetch per hectare (ha). As we found we were attracting a lot of pheasants in the crop, we are now using a mixture of 2.5kg/ha OSR, 2kg/ha burseem clover and 10kg/ ha vetch. Each species has different functions in the mixture. The vetch is deep rooting and breaks compaction to open up the soil for the OSR and also provides residual nitrogen; the buckwheat is good for creating a cover to smother weeds, making phosphate more available and distracting pests as well as providing a structural function to stop the crop going ISSUE 7 | OCTOBER 2019
