NIGEL AKEHURST VISITS: ROMSHED FARM
TRACKING AND FIELD This month Nigel Akehurst visits Romshed Farm, in the small village of Underriver near Sevenoaks in Kent, to meet farmer Fidelity Weston and her son Inigo and learn more about their nature-friendly family farm.
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Arriving at Romshed farm down a long treelined lane in the picturesque Kent countryside, I park up in the traditional farmyard and find my way to the old farmhouse. Fidelity and her son Inigo greet me at the door and invite me in. We start chatting about a group of their cows that are wearing the world’s first GPS collars. Developed by a Norwegian technology company called Nofence, these collars promise to revolutionise the way livestock farmers graze animals on pasture. As the company name suggests, the GPS collars negate the need to have physical fences and allow the farmer to create virtual fences via an App on their smartphone that ultimately controls where animals can graze. Fidelity opens her Nofence App and shows me a list of the cows currently grazing a field just off a small country lane in the nearby village of Plaxtol. “There are no fences,” she said, confirming that
without the collars the cows could go anywhere. She brings up a map on the App that shows the virtual fence boundary in the field where the cows are grazing and explained: “You can set the grazing area by drawing on the map. There’s a boundary of about five meters. As they approach, it plays a tune and then “zap”, they get a shock. Over time they learn to turn their head away.” Another section in the App shows the number of animals that have heard the tune and the number of shocks. This data provides a fascinating insight into the character of the cows and allows her to see which are leaders and followers. Interestingly, some of the cows have never received a shock, she said. The technology is proving useful, but she can’t see it replacing physical fencing soon. “I wouldn’t be 100% confident to rely on it next to a main road, especially with the risk of dogs chasing
> Fidelity Weston and her son Inigo
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animals,” she explained. The other limiting factor is cost. At present the collars are £250 apiece and the software to run them is another £50 a year (per collar), making it unviable back on the home farm, she said. However, for grazing small parcels of outlying land the technology works well and she can cover some of her costs by charging landowners £20 an acre to graze their land. This invariably works out cheaper than getting a local contractor to top the grass, as well as being beneficial for biodiversity, she explained. “I’m on a mission to get all these little areas grazed and not topped. It makes such a difference to wildlife,” she said. “A recent customer described how the field feels more alive. The cattle had only been in there a couple of weeks, eaten it down and it starts growing again. It’s so natural. You get your tufty bits for voles
