Ask An Expert: Tom Macfarlane on regenerative agriculture
In our new video series, we’re taking questions from UK farmers and putting them to specialists in the field. To get the ball rolling, our co-founder, arable farmer Andrew Huxham, asks:
“I’ve heard a lot about regenerative agriculture in recent years, but where would I start? Is it possible without adding unsustainable workload and complexity?”
Here’s our answer from Tom Macfarlane of Little Rollright Farm:
What is your own experience with regenerative agriculture? What advice would you give other farmers starting down this path? Please add your own views and suggestions to the comments at the bottom of this page.
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Transcript
Andrew Huxham
Hello, I’m Andrew Huxham. I’m an arable farmer and a co-founder of Hectare Trading.
We started Hectare Trading to help farmers get better prices for their crops, and a big part of that is through access to better information.
In this spirit, we want to connect farmers with the best possible expertise for any and every question that you might have. And this is where Ask An Expert comes in. Send us your questions and we’ll get them answered by an expert on the topics as quickly as we can.
So, to kick things off, I have heard a lot about regenerative agriculture over the past few years. How could I and do I get started on this? Where is the best source of advice for regenerative agriculture? And is it profitable without adding a lot of extra work or requiring a lot more attention to detail that we currently already have within the business?
So, over to you…
Tom Macfarlane
I’m the manager here at Little Rollright. We’ve got about 700 acres which we try and farm in as responsible a way as we possibly can.
I think “experts” in Regen Ag are very few and far between, and I certainly am not one of them. But I do think that we are all of us on a journey. It’s an extremely exciting time to be involved in agriculture, particularly in the United Kingdom. And we need to be stronger and we need to be able to stand on our own two feet and we need to be, well, we need to be lateral thinkers.
Yes, it is profitable on a smaller scale. But also, yes, it is harder work. And you have to accept that. Where do you start?
Two generations ago, say, the farmer would walk to the gate and say, I’m going to plant wheat in this field this year, the end. And that’s how I’m going to make money out of this field this year. You can’t do that now. You have to stand at that field gate and you have to say, how many times during the course of the next 12 months can I get someone to cut me a check for something that I do in this field?
And so, first of all, it might be a peculiar-shaped field. So you square away a central area. So that’s an easily worked area and all your hard little pokey corners. You put that into, if you’ve got it available to you, a scheme. If not, then put it into something that is attractive to your bee colonies, like borage or something like that. So that’s check number one.
And then what are you going to do with your worked area in the middle? Well, you’re going to probably plant a cover crop because you want to fix some nitrogen in the old-fashioned way. And you’re going to graze that cover crop before you drill your spring crop. And so there’s another check. Your livestock is another harvest. Then you’ve got your spring crop, that’s another harvest. Then you’ve got your honey from bees, that’s another harvest. That’s before you’ve sold any carbon that you’ve sequestered in the soil or anything like that. So all of a sudden you’re getting a bunch of checks that you weren’t getting before just because you’re being a little bit of a lateral thinker.
You have to have an appetite for it, it envelopes you. The great thing about this community is talking to people who have been down this road and, more importantly, know where the potholes are. Most of them are really happy to share where those potholes are. They’re not necessarily filling them in for you, but they’re telling you there’s a big one down there, you just need to be aware of it.
Well, pretty much everything we do, we start out in the first year with a control and an experiment and we see how it measures up to what we’re doing already. And then if the experiment beats the control, then we go with it a hundred percent the following year.
Not all of these techniques are for everyone. I know that there are various organisations out there that people grow for and they started out life with a very specific prescription as to how they wanted their crops grown. And it became very clear after a very short period of time that that specific prescription was not possible on a lot of their growers’ farms. And so they had to become a bit more fluid with their prescriptions. So, not everything will work for everyone: you’ve just got to find what works for you and you’ll only find that out by having experiments.
UK agriculture is in a big change at the moment. And whereas our grandparents would go to the pub and discuss how good their yields are, we need to get out of that thought mindset. And we need to be going to the pub and boasting about what our net margins are.
Don’t be afraid to try stuff. As I said at the start, there are no real experts. We’re all really feeling our way.