'Insects are a powerful tool for food production'

Hello, welcome to Farmgate. I'm Finlow Costain, the editor of 8.9.com Integrated Pest Management is about establishing a farm as a connected ecosystem, about building diversity and abundance so that nature is in balance and so that farm businesses can be successful without the profligate use of chemicals and medicines. To investigate the subject, I'm joined by horticulturalist Andy Dibbon, the head grower at Abbeyholme Farm near Cirencester, by Patrick Barker, an Arabic honourable farmer from Lodge Farm near Westhorpe in Suffolk, and by Angus Walton, a livestock producer from Peelham Farm in the Scottish Borders. Program production has been very kindly sponsored by the Nature Friendly Farming Network. Welcome all. Andy, could you start us off? You came to abbey home farm 10 years ago. What was different about it?

0:05

Well, I've been an organic veg farmer for 17 years, often on startups. And 10 years ago I moved to Abbey Home Farm, which is definitely not a startup. So it's been under current management for 35 years and it's been certified organic for 35 years. It's 16, 1600 acres. And what I witnessed when I arrived here is no agricultural chemicals for 35 years on 1600 acres has a really profound effect on ecosystems and biodiversity. And as a organic horticulturalist, that's a really, biodiversity is a really, really important tool for me and my crop production. So actually it was the first farm I worked on where I felt like I could truly deliver the core philosophy of organic food production.

0:49

And of course you're talking about 1600 acres there. The horticulture oper isn't across that whole farm, is it?

1:31

No, luckily not. It's 15 acres of horticulture, but we grow 90 different crops. But it's, it's essentially a giant self sufficiency project for the local community. And the farm produces all the kinds of meat, eggs, we have dairy, we have dairy processing, we have a butchery on site, there's 600 acres of arable and we have a bakery on site, Farm shop and cafe. So yeah, it's a lovely place to live and work and we do pretty much everything you can do in the uk.

1:37

Does that mean that everything is going into that sort of short supply chain, that sort of direct sales or. I mean, is any of it going further afield?

2:01

It's all about economies of scale. So horticulture, all of it, all the production, 12 months of the year goes into the farm shop and the cafe. We very occasionally will sell gluts off farm, but almost all the other, the agriculture as such rather than the horticulture because of economies of scale, you'll find most of that, apart from the chickens and the eggs, most of it goes off site to enable us to keep the price down for the direct sales on site.

2:08

Fantastic. Now, thinking about integrated pest management or IPM as a lot of people refer to it. You've said I don't look at irrigation and pest control, planting and weeding separately. You've talked about a systems approach. What is that? Could you sort of explain what you.

2:33

Mean in simple terms? A systems approach is a core part of the organic philosophy is address looking at the whole farm as a joined up ecosystem or just system of production. So really, I mean I'm literally at this time of year, we're kind of where I. We are mid to end of January. I'm just finishing all my crop planning. When I do my crop planning, I think of absolutely everything from start to finish involved in producing those crops. That includes pest management, it includes irrigation and I also the whole farm approach, basically I'm not just looking at the cropping areas and I don't blink at myself and go, this is why I do my cropping. And this is everywhere else. I see the areas where we don't do cropping as just as an important part of that system, especially with this subject of integrated pest management. So rough grassland, woodland, hedgerows, bare ground, all of it plays a crucial role to some form of insect or animal behavior which will have a direct, whether it be positive or negative impact on my crops. So I have to take that into my, my whole planning approach.

2:46

Fantastic. And we're going to come into some of that in more detail as we move forward through the program. Angus Peelham Farm is all about cattle, very different from horticulture and arable. Tell me about your farm and what integrated pest management means for you.

3:51

So we are 500 acres of organic, certified pasture, flush certified ground up on the southeast coast of Scotland. We're literally, just, literally over the England border. The farm has been on a fairly sort of, you know, aggressive journey over the last 20 years. We went organic in 2007 primarily in my opinion, nature became our primary stakeholder in a previous life where I got to travel the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere as a fishing guide. It provided real context and understanding of what wilderness regions should look like, unadulterated by man returning home to the farm to realise that actually in the UK and in sort of fairly heavily managed landscapes, we're not doing a great job of putting nature first. So part of that evolution was me realizing that Pelham as a farm, when we had pigs, cattle and sheep, and we were kind of trying to max output as an organic operation, really wasn't working. And it occurred to me that we had to look at this in a different way. I had no choice. I mean, it was impacting profit. We weren't. I wasn't able to run a sustainable business with longevity. There just wasn't. I want, you know, the KPIs weren't delivering. It was arguably, it was breaking everybody involved. So in terms of integrated pest management, I'm not going to say it came as like an epiphany overnight. It's been an evolution to a point in time where if you keep a close enough eye on what you're doing as a farmer, suddenly you start to see you are rewarded visually by. Okay, that's interesting, right? So three years ago, I thought, well, the only way to manage my calves was not wean them, noticing that they were getting large rounds of pneumonia in the winter. They weren't thriving. Pneumonia, diagnosed pneumonia. And maybe five or six calves. But then at least 25% of the herd would have suffered when they were housed cold winters. Thought, well, you know, as part of this journey, let's just not wean. And then overnight I have no pneumonia, so I don't wean until February, you know. And so it's a development. It's always a development around that strategy of becoming holistic. So in terms of the pests that I'm dealing with, obviously there are viruses and there's bacteria, but fundamentally the big ones for me are fluke, coccidiosis, worms, obviously. And, yeah, and we do vaccinate, so I do vaccinate for bvd. We're on a pedigree journey as well, and I think that's sensible. But in terms of those three, the nasties, fluke, coccidiosis and worms, they really dominate a lot of my focus in terms of how I change system.

4:05

Let's come on to those more specifically a bit later. What I'm interested in is that you talked about, you know, going away and seeing how nature operated in wilderness regions and then coming back and seeing the farm and. And wanting to embrace some of that. Does your farm look visibly different today than it did a decade ago?

6:44

Oh, my word. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't recognize it, actually. So under pigs, cattle and sheep, with tightening margins and really struggling financially, reinvestment in infrastructure has been a problem. And so really since 2012, for example, I will have built. It'll be north of 45,000 meters of new fencing. A lot of that was supported by the government, srdp, Round one and eecs. We've done an enormous amount of hedging. I mean, in 2023 we were awarded. I think it's the largest hedging project in Scotland ever. It was across three farms, 16 kilometers of hedgerow put in in one hit, we did 11. And we split every field on the farm, right, banks back down the middle of a GPS with a hedge to facilitate a sort of more integrated rotational grazing system. And the whole farm is grass, so we've slowed the whole farm down and, yeah, the whole farm's grass.

7:01

Patrick, I wonder if you could sort of talk to me about cereals because obviously we started talking about livestock, we started talking about horticulture. You're in a cereals context. Could you talk to me about what your farm looks like and your approach to integrated pest management?

7:59

Yeah. Thank you, Finn. So we're. We're 550 hectares of Beckle series boulder clay. So good heavy stitch your boots clay. And nothing different really, to everyone else in this area of Suffolk that we're in. Most of the farms around us are of similar size. Everyone has. Has similar machinery and one or two staff and really are doing the same things for the same people. So we've always kind of prided ourselves on not being unique, just trying to farm in a way that everyone can and, and be the people everyone looks at and goes, that looks like it's working. How are you doing that? So for us, we're growing, you know, two thirds of the farmers in winter wheat at any one time. The rotation around that is, or seed rate, spring barley, spring beans, sometimes linseed, when we've got a combine in warranty and we've now we've got winter barley back in our rotation as well to facilitate orsed rape. And we've just actually just stopped growing ryegrass herbage, rye grass for seed as well. There's an interesting change coming in organic matter and actually how we plan all our break crops. And we're growing, you know, we're just growing the best possible crops we can for the least amount of money, looking at every operation and trying to make sure that there is margin in everything we do. And for me, that is also how I answer the question, are you a regenerative farm? It is the same answer. It's. We're doing the best we can for the natural environment whilst trying to spend as little money as possible. And by doing that, we're using far less fertilizer. Every time we use a pesticide application, it's been well thought out, it's been planned and it's been questioned as well. There's farms that I know of where it's the what if scenario, you know, what if we don't use it? And for us it's like actually what if we don't use it? That's sometimes that's okay. So I think what we've tried to do is we're just trying to create a farm where we're growing produce for the human food supply chain and cereals, but trying to then benefit the natural environment as much as we possibly can. And we do that with the best possible use of public money in terms of different stewardship schemes. And we've been in a, we had a 10 year HLS scheme followed by 5 year higher tier scheme and we're now in our second 5 year higher tier scheme. So we're now just approaching our 19th year of continuous environmental stewardship. And then we're able to supplement those schemes with private funding through lends, east of England Lends, Landscape Enterprise Networks. So being able to work much closer with our supply chain partners, and that's Nestle Purina, it's PepsiCo, Suntory, it's all the funders of Lens being able to then look in more detail at crops we're growing rather than landscape options and biodiversity benefiting options to actually how do we grow those crops in a more sustainable and regenerative way. So again, it's, it's talking about that whole farm ecosystem, which I'm sure we'll come on to a bit later, but trying to make sure that we're doing everything in balance together.

8:13

You talked about priding yourself on not being too unique, on trying to make sure that you were farming similarly to everybody else around. But if you're doing something with integrated pest management, which is quite innovative, there must be differences in terms of appearance on your farm. And do you have any way of sort of articulating some of those differences?

10:44

Yeah, I think for us it's all part of the journey as well. Angus said a minute ago it wasn't an epiphany moment, it's been an evolution. It's been exactly the same for us as well in that we started off when we drew up our first HLS scheme. We just looked at all the marginal land and said, this is land we're not going to farm, we're going to straighten fields, we're going to make all our arable operations more efficient and we're not going to farm the bits that we don't want to be farming. We're going to turn them over to stewardship schemes and make sure that nature is benefiting. And over time, you know, with that, we're almost just, we're farming the farm hard and nature was having the rest of it. And as we've got much more detailed into the way we manage our soil health, the way we look at all that farmland, wildlife, the evolution for us has been the whole farm ecosystem. So the farm looks different because there's catch crops and overwinter cover crops, and where we're direct drilling into cereal stubbles, actually the landscape doesn't go from golden to short to brown to green. It's a kind of messy, muddy, yellowy color, all kind of all autumn and all winter. And you can drive past a direct drilled field and go, that actually looks different. What earth is going on there? And we now know that's just what direct drilled cereal fields look like. It is just getting your head round that it's different as well. And, you know, for us, overwinter cover crops. But people ring me up and say, what earth is in that field? What are you doing? And I explain, it's green. It's just green compost. It's everything that you do in your garden where you're putting horse muck on your roses. We're actually. We're growing our own root system and we're growing our own goodness. And we just call it open to cover crops because that's the funny term that we use that farmers understand. For us, this has been a journey, but we're in a farm office where there's a few of us, as my cousin and I, and we talk about stuff together. You know, we can. We can talk about the good things, the bad things and throw ideas around. And we were also a strategic farm previously for the hdb. So that is where a lot of our learning came from and gave us the opportunity to try things. And lots of other farmers coming on the farm, looking at what we're doing and actually accepting that it's different. And you have to change your mindset. And there's a whole number of different things that farmers need to get their heads around for this to actually work as a system.

11:04

We started doing this with Patrick, Andy, but I wonder, because I want to sort of get into the specifics a bit more, and I just wonder, you know, in terms of, in integrated pest management, what it means to you in practice, what you're physically doing, how you're managing the farm differently.

13:01

The thing that's clear to me, and I've been in farming for 27, 28 years, is that for some reason farming, especially in the developed west, was going down a reductionist route. And basically where we'd ended up with when I entered farming was the only thing in the field was the cash crop. The only I was the only plant in the field. There was also no animals or insects in that field at all. I take the exact opposite approach. Nature hates a vacuum. Essentially. The nature will not let a vacuum exist. Nowhere on planet Earth do mono crops dominate the landscape. So there's an inherent like luck to this for me as a horticulturalist that we grow lots of different crops anyway. But we take the exact opposite to reductionist approach. We try and introduce as much complexity into all of our cropping areas. Inside, outside, small scale, large scale. We tried to bring in as many different species as plant as possible, both cash crop and non cash crop. We also try and with that nature hating a vacuum, you know what pesticides do is they remove every living thing in the field so that if an aphid or a caterpillar turns up, it just explodes its population because there's nothing to control it. The attitude we take here is we try and pack that the animal ecosystem with as many different species as possible. And it's the same with weeds. If you have loads of different plant species, nothing can dominate and take over. The key skill, and it's been referenced lots of times, is we're not just a nature reserve, we're trying to produce food for the human supply chain, is to have maximum complexity but maintain really high levels of efficiency and production at the same time. So yeah, that's kind of the overarching philosophy in far like details of how we do that is basically if we look at the fantastic complex wildlife habitats on the farm, hedgerows, woodlands, wetland areas, and they tend to be situated outside of our cropping areas. So we're very, very into wildlife corridors to bring all of that, a fantastic biodiversity to the production fields. And then the really important bit is to bring it from the edge of the field right into the middle of the field. So we use annual wildflower strips. All our cropping areas have agroforestry in them. We use perennial wildflower strips. We under sow loads and loads of our crops with green manures. And any areas not in cash crop production, we do a lot of fertility building. We use very diverse lays which we proactively manage. So there's always some flowering. So yeah, as far as insect and animal pests are concerned, it's habitat and a food source for 12 months of the year is what we're trying to supply. Right. In the cropping area.

13:15

And when we spoke previously, you were talking about dead things, the importance of dead things as well.

15:53

Yeah. I mean, like, I think we're going to talk about specific pests later, but as an example of that. Yeah, dead things, living things, they're all of them, a vital part of the ecosystem. And it's talked a lot in gardening about how you shouldn't tidy up your garden at the end of the summer. It's exactly the same in farming. Deadwood is very, very important. Our agroforestry, if we, if we harvest trees or copper them, you'll always leave some on the ground. Deadwood is the primary habitat for beetles. Beetles, the primary predators of slugs. But also your crops are a habitat as well, and you're finished. If I harvest an area of cauliflowers, you know, people would used to tidy that up and cut it down and mulch it into the ground. If it's in the beginning of the winter, I just leave it standing. And those cauliflowers, which we've taken the cauliflower flower away, we leave those, they're covered in the pupae of hoverflies. So that's where my predators are. Overwintering is on those finished cauliflower plants. So that the, the finished crops are just as important and just as important a habitat as hedgerows or agroforestry or woodlands.

15:58

When you talk about this, it almost. It's as if you're sort of farming those sort of pests and predators as well and integrating that sort of mindset into your system. ANGUS Many farmers still treat their land and their livestock prophylactically with medicines and chemicals. They'll spray or they'll medicate proactively to prevent pests, rather than managing and monitoring stock and then only treating disease when it occurs. You've talked about being prophylactic by mindset, which is a great phrase. What does it mean?

16:59

Essentially, you know, to be prophylactic, something that is intended to prevent disease. If you're using a prophylactic treatment, obviously you're treating an animal that's. Or plant that's become sick due because it's got a disease. When I first started going down this journey of changing the farm system, you know, I'll be honest, I was very financially focused.

17:27

Yeah.

17:47

So it was all about margin, but because of my upbringing was having this mindset of Going, actually, do you know what? But there's more to here, more to this journey and the story than I'm able to visualize. And it's funny how, just commenting something that Patrick said earlier about how the landscape looks different. I mean, where I farm, I'm surrounded by, you know, arguably some of the world's most productive arable farms right on the Tweed Valley. We're right in the Tweed Merse. I look down on it and I'll get these funny phone calls from neighbors and pals going, are you ever going to graze that field or are you just going to leave it? So, no, no, no, no, no. Just you. She wait. Just you wait. Yeah, there'll be cattle in there, this window. Don't you worry about it. And that mindset, first and foremost, is so important. The mindset approach to farming that heals, it prevents disease. Not just nature, not just healing the landscape or healing livestock, but it's also healing ourselves. You know, you don't have to travel too far in farming these days to have a mental health conversation with somebody. You know, it's an endemic issue in agriculture. And I think a lot of that is down to the way. It's down to our perception of delivery. You know, something else Andy was saying that is, you know, leaving dead material in fields. The industry would, would encourage you to tidy your fields up, to top your grass margins, to sterilize the landscape. We live in an agricultural industry that fundamentally is defined by the periodic table. And so I refer to the prophylactic mindset is because first and foremost, you have to be able to prevent disease by shifting the mindset into a place of empathy for the landscape, for nature, for the livestock, for the plants, by being able to listen and see and hear rather than being so obsessed about output. Because at the end of the day, not wanting to sound selfish about this, the only reason my business has longevity and sustainability, true sustainability, and I think that's a very gray area in terms of what that definition is of true sustainability. It has to be profitable. If I'm not making money, doesn't matter how good my system is. You can run as many ideologies as you want across agriculture. Fundamentally, if you're not making money at this job and government can't support us till the cows come home, yes, they need to incentivize us to change, and they had certainly helped with, with certain initiatives, but they can't support us to be profitable. The market still has to prevail. And so as Patrick and I were talking about earlier, it was mentioned by both of us is that actually, you know, this is an evolution. So I became prophylactic by mindset, by going, okay, nature. I hope nature has my back. Why? Because I have confidence that nature's got my back. Because of what I've seen in my travels. I've seen some unbelievable sites that are indescribable by modern terms of how nature integrates and interact, how predators interact with prey. Unbelievable. I have no idea. I can't explain it. But I was, Nate, there's more to this nature malark than we think.

17:47

Right.

20:28

So I was like, I'm just going to give it a shot. I've got nothing to lose. Because ultimately the business wasn't profitable for, you know, for a long time. We were, you know, trying desperately to become resilient by growing all of our own crops. We were growing spring beans, spring barley to feed pigs. We were running, pigs maxed out, pigs were wrecking the soils. You know, it was having a negative impact on the cattle. We were housing cattle, producing a lot of silage, sheep. It was just, you know, a disaster. It was very, very hard to manage.

20:28

So by welcoming nature back onto the farm, you've. You've been able to sort of recreate that profitability that had been lost.

20:53

Oh, yeah. It's completely changed the bottom line. Like, I can live as a family. We've got two families here. I. I've now got. I'm confident in the fact that I've got 20 years of this before the cattle price went where it went. It's even better now. Yeah. So I hope that kind of explains it because it's, you know, I did I make a note here to deliver profitability with longevity.

21:00

So it's about creating resilience by encouraging diversity, by recreating abundance, by learning from those natural systems and while recruiting nature back into the system. It's really interesting. We'll go into the details in just a moment. Patrick, you've been documenting change across the last 15 years or so as you've been implementing new systems and approaches. How have you monitored and recorded that data across that period and what have you found?

21:20

Yeah, I think for me, my very first kind of interest in it was when we, when we went into our first HLS scheme and we were doing educational visits and school visits and wider groups. And I just wanted to be able to show people that there was value for money from the public palace. So it just started recording what we saw. Notebook after notebook after notebook. That's kind of almost become a bit of an Obsession to tell people that. I think we actually invented public money for public goods because we identified that we wanted to show people what the public purse was delivering. And for me that was biodiversity. And by using these schemes really well, we could just show all those increases and all those different species and, and we had a pretty good idea that, you know, barn owls returned to the farm in 2009 because we put boxes up and we'd monitor them, we'd ring chicks. And also 2009 we ring the first buzzard chick for Suffolk. And that was a time when seems ridiculous now that buzzards were a bird, that everyone was going, cool, we've seen one of them, we don't even know what it is. They have them in the west country a lot in Suffolk. It was, it was a rare bird and now clearly it isn't. You know, then red kites and ravens have come in behind them. So I know that as those top predator apex predators have increased, about 2009 we found the first badger set as well on apex. We then realized that we must have that ecosystem underneath that we're building to support the predators. And we knew that our butterfly numbers had always been high, but we knew we hadn't got enough flowers. So everything then started just to come together and build it as we did. And then we joined the HDB Monitor Farm program and started looking at a way to create farming for the future. This was at the time our polluter pays was being thrown around and Brexit was, was being talked about. Although we had, you know, we had no idea what the implications of that would be. But there was a lot of looking forwards and people trying to just this is what, this is how farming is going to be. And then over that three year period, the Monitor Farm program went so well. We then became a strategic farm for the hdb and that really was a much more detailed look at how we grow cereals. North seas in the east of England in a way that gives sustainable farm businesses and longevity in farm businesses. And one of the work streams for that whole six year strategic farm program was integrated pest management. If we put flowering margins around fields, what is the effect it has? How does it affect our crop pests? You know, how far apart should these margins be? How does it work? And we looked at that and I thought, thought this is going to be all the answers. This is everything we've, we've been asking for. And, and actually what we, what we found out was that it's such a massively intricate topic that putting a flowering margin around A field. It actually didn't, it didn't give us any answers, it just gave us about another hundred questions. And the hdb, they weren't as keen on detail as I wanted. So we, you know, they did a lot of work looking at our crop pests. You know, actually your, your aphid numbers in your cereals, that they're, they're not as high as possibly you thought they were. And, and had, we had that level of information, but I didn't have the species detail that I wanted. So I then applied to the Felix Thornley Cobble Trust, which is a East Anglian charity supporting research and people on farms, and said, look, I've got all the, everything here. The HDB have already funded these flowering margins around fields and strips up the middle, said, can I do some really detailed study work? Just help me understand. I was awarded 3, 4, 5,000 pounds, minuscule amount for the amount of research that we actually developed. And we just, we realized that we had 278 different species just using one field margin in one summer. That's things that move. And then I went back to the HDB and said, look, this is what we found, this is what we can tell farmers that if you put a flowering margin around a field, this is what you can expect now could have some more money to go and look at the, the insects, the predatory insects and putting the pests in way more detail. And we did that and we spent a whole year looking at all the insects and using flowering margins in detail. And you know, we've now we've recorded 61 different species of bees on the farm. We've recorded 137 species of fly, of which 35 of them are hoverflies. And we've almost all of those hoverflies, as Andy talked about, are beneficial predatory insects. You know, they're feeding on aphids, they're feeding on larvae when they come out of hibernation, all that. It just started to build and build and build. We, we found species that had only been recorded in Suffolk four times previously. We found a species of ant called Stenama West Wood Eye. It said it's the 21st time it's been recorded in the UK, you know, so actually all this, all this. Oh, there isn't any wildlife on farms. You know, we read it in the press a lot when we started looking and had someone who genuinely knew what he was looking at and knew how to record stuff. His name's David Basham. He's absolutely brilliant. He spends a lot of time Just peering through a little eyeglass, trying to see whether the. The back legs of a bee or a black or white, because he knows that's the only way you can tell these two species apart. Whereas we would just go, oh, it's a bee. Yeah. Before this, people said to me, I know how the bees on the farm. And I'd be like, we've got about three different sorts. Maybe there's honeybees, big ones and small ones. And now I can sit here, you know, I know that we've got Melitta trisecta and Melitta liparina. And I know that if I go looking on Red Bartzia in the autumn, we're going to find Melita tri center, because that's, that's when it comes out. And I know what the cuckoo species are, you know, so this has been a massive learning process for me as well. But the detail and the detailed insect recording is what has kind of just given us this idea that if we create the whole farm ecosystem, we don't need the detail so much as we need the whole. And we need a whole landscape that we manage as a whole. We manage it. This whole farm ecosystem is probably the third or fourth time I've said it now, but it genuinely is that if we're growing. If we're growing crops and we're creating the right habitats, we're managing our hedges sympathetically, doing the right, hitting them hard when we need to, you know, it all fits around the whole farm, the whole landscape, all the species then benefit. Hopefully it's something that we can keep up maybe 80% year on year, as opposed to that big crash and ups and downs and, you know, there's big population recoveries. And for me, you know, there's. The ways that I actually much rather quantify it. Is Daniel Zeisner, when he was doing his general election tour, looking at farms, he stood on a farm and he stopped. He was talking about something, he stopped and he just looked around. He said. He said, isn't there a lot of birdsong on this farm? And I said, thank you very much. That's what we're trying to. Trying to achieve. And it just, it genuinely is noticeable. It's just full of life and people. People say to me, oh, I've seen more butterflies in my garden than I've ever seen before. And I said, well, that's because we've got a flowering margin going around the outside. And that's because we want there to be butterflies here, because we understand their importance in everything. We're trying to do so, you know, it's, for me, it's, it's. If you work at it and it's incentivized correctly from different places, you know, use schemes for the spirit of their design, which is to create biodiversity increases and create better environmental management. And then also at the same time, when we have supply chains who want to help deliver it as well, which we have in some cases, and in some cases we don't. But we're constantly looking and we're constantly asking, you know, this is worth more. How do you, can you help us put value on these products that don't have a value, like butterflies and bees and clean water and clean air, you know, help us deliver that better and you can share the story. And that's what we're able to do at times with, with Purina, with Pepsico.

21:48

So. So the component parts are important, but really it's about the sum of the parts, about making the landscape as a whole work, making the whole ecosystem function. It's really interesting. Patrick, I want to move on to talking through some of the specifics now, and I wonder whether you could outline some of the key pests that are associated with system with cereals and in seed and beans, and whether you could just talk me through the particulars of how integrated pest management helps you to manage those particular pests.

28:27

A lot of this just comes down to good planning and good decision making at the start. So two thirds of the farmers in winter wheat, and then there's also spring and spring barley, winter barley as well. So cereals cover a big area of what we do. So I actually don't really have any real worries about insect pests in cereals because the HDB work showed us that, you know, our aphid numbers in our cereal crops really aren't at a level that we need to be worrying about. That takes out a massive headache for me. We make sure that we are growing orange blossom, midge resistant weeds, so we're taking out that, that risk. And then actually the pest risks in terms of insects for us are in the spring crops. You know, we, we grew mustard one year and we had a massive outbreak of sawfly, which was a bit of a disaster. And an insecticide went on and we still lost the crop. So actually we look at what we're doing now and it's like, well, can we just, just get our functioning farming system right that benefits everything else. So for me, if we're growing all seed right, we get it in behind winter barley, we get it and put it in Good conditions, we get it away early and the crop will grow away from the cabbage stem flea beetle or the, or the weevil or whatever else is that, that we find that that does become a problem. But if we can reduce our seed rate, we can grow these crops sympathetically. We give the plant the best use to fighting back as opposed to us going in with a cannon and, and smashing out everything. And when we actually stopped and looked at it, we took the view on this farm that it was more cost effective for us to be insecticide free in SFI and take the payment than it was to want that in our back pocket and keep it in the armoury. So we, you know, we took the decision that there may be a time, if the conditions are right, that we have a problem. But for us being incentivized to be insectified, insecticide free, we weren't even really hardly using it anyway. But all those farmers, it's, we've got it if we need it, you know, it's that, that type of insurance policy. So insect pests aren't our biggest concern. Grass, weeds. Yeah, grass weeds are a whole different story.

28:54

So tell me about weeds. Obviously, when we're talking about pests and predators, I think, you know, my instinct is to sort of think in terms of insects. But of course, you know, weeds can be considered in that sort of same way. So how do you manage these, particularly within your cash crops?

30:34

Again, it's, it's sympathetically. You know, we know that if we've got may weed and we've got ground soil, actually. Yeah. How long can we leave them? How long can we let them flower? Can we get them before they go to seed? Can we actually use them as part of this process? Can we do the majority of our black grass targeting when we haven't got a crop in the ground? It's about good timing, it's about allowing yourself time to think about these things as well. On this farm, there's quite an effective decision making process between the farmer, the spray operator and the agronomist. And I'm the fourth person who just says, are you sure you need that? Are you sure you need that? How much is it going to cost? Do we really need to be doing that? So what we find is that actually everything gets questioned then when I pitch in and say, how much are we actually going to get for this? How much are we growing it for? And everyone goes, oh yeah, I'm not sure we do need it actually. You know, so it's all those multi layers of decision making. Rather than just this is what we're going to do because the agronomist has written a spray recommendation because he's, he doesn't want to go out and get fired that day for getting something wrong. So it's just the way it all fits together. We do have the elephant in the room for us is slugs. In all this IPM and insecticide free, there's still slug pellets sitting in the shed. And slugs are the one thing that I think farmers are just terrified of. We know that if we have grass margins around every field, we can create the best habitat for ground beetles. We can't seem to get the balance of having enough ground beetles to eat the slugs at the speed we need them to. So we're constantly reviewing it and we're constantly saying how do we get to a point where actually these, these slopes, musculos is in a position we can't need it, we don't need them. We haven't got to that point yet. And that's something that we're really, really working on and trying to figure out, you know, and looking elsewhere, you know, how do they do it in the organic systems? Is this something that we really can get on top of? Because actually the market isn't really rewarding nature friendly farming when we're trying to do it on this scale. At the moment, price of wheat is still £160 a ton. Whether it's us doing it the way we do it or the neighbors doing it the way they do it, you know, we're receiving the same price. We're trying to fight that balance as well. And then say actually trying to find people and say this is a better product, it comes from a better landscape. Surely there must be a reward in here somewhere.

30:46

And when you talk about £160 a tonne, that's effectively in real terms, isn't it? About a third of the value that it was 50 years ago, which is remarkable. And just in terms of you mentioned spraying there, what is it that you're spraying? Because it's not insecticides, presumably?

32:39

No, we are not using insecticides on this farm. Or I think we've used insecticides three times in, in 15 years. One was the mustard, one was a black bean aphid outbreak in a field of beans which just went way ahead of any thresholds that we ever thought probably was even possible. And I can't even remember what the other one was. It was so long ago. So for us it's grass, weeds for the most part. It's black grass or it's spraying off over into cover crops where we need to as well. And actually using glyphosate against overwinter cover crops is far better than going in there and harrowing it and plowing it and turning the soil over and doing that sort of stuff. So. So, you know, we're, we're not quite yet in a position where if we have a big biomass, we've actually figured out how we can get cereal crops established without doing that. We have a light over into cover crop. You know, we have a really a poor growing autumn for cover crops. We can go straight in and the frost will take them out and we can drill straight away. So again, that's a balance as well in wet years. You know, I don't think we've, we've found a way to fight fungicide or replace fungicides in cereals just at this moment in time. The fungicides are important just to make sure that we have a crop at the end of the end of the day that people want to buy.

32:54

Andy, I wonder if you could give me some specifics about how you manage your environment to reduce pests and increase predatory insects and beetles and that sort of thing. And when we spoke before, I thought, you know, we should have the conversation again about aphids, slugs and cabbage white caterpillars, because I thought what you were saying was fascinating.

33:56

So yeah, it's been referenced many times already during these interviews. But it is really. I do not focus on individual pests and I focus on the bottom of the food webs. And for most of us, that's either soil or that's plants. So healthy soils and really diverse plant species everywhere. And then all the predators that I need to manage these things, aphids, slugs and caterpillars, they are produced as that food web develops up through the, through the levels of the food web. And if we look at them individually and what I'll do is with aphids, I'll actually talk about how we manage them inside in what we call protected cropping. So in the big production glass house, because it demonstrates a key kind of understanding of natural life cycles. So in traditional pest management, whether it be organic or non organic, with a glass house, the idea is what you do is you attract predators in from outside into your protected cropping structures to eat these aphids. Our aphid pressure in the glass house generally is late February, March is really, really heavy aphid pressure, late February, March. There are no aphid predators that are actually awake in, in the UK countryside. So that's actually quite a false philosophy and you and people end up relying on buying in biocontrols or using insecticides. So the way we counteract this with aphids is we have perennial habitats within the glass house, so perennial wildflowers and then we also cross crop trees in the glass house and then agroforestry system inside the trees. Any woody perennial, whether it be shrubs or trees, are fantastic overwintering habitat for a whole variety of insect predators. Ladybirds, hoverfly larvae, and again, perennial wildflower strips. They're great in the summer, providing a food source, but in the winter, they're just as important. The, the leaf litter on the ground, the hollow tubes of dead plant stems. This is where pupae and lava overwinter. So it's, it's about providing as much diversity at any one time as a habitat. But it's also really important to be thinking about this subject 12 months of the year and supporting all stages of the life cycle for us in that February March period. With aphids, it's hover flies. They're the. Absolutely. They are the. The first predators we find inside and outside to turn up every year there. They're then quickly followed by ladybird larvae. But I have to say, ladybird larvae, or ladybirds in general, they're a little bit sluggish to wake up. They want spring to really warm up before they get going. Basically, if we move outside and we look at things like anyone who's ever tried to grow a cabbage on an allotment has normally lost all of them to cabbage white caterpillars, that is a big challenge for us. Lots of people in our industry, they either spray them off if you're not organic, or they use crop meshes and they cover all of their Brassica plants with crop mesh to keep the butterflies out. We actually take the exact opposite approach. We occasionally cover our crops with crop mesh, but that's to stop early pigeon damage. As soon as our plants are big enough, we are absolutely chomping at the bit to get the meshes off all of our crops, because the caterpillars always get in, they always get under the meshes.

34:13

But what.

37:23

And then what the meshes are doing is they're actually keeping all the predators out. So. So that's, that's doing the exact opposite of what we want them to do. So we get the meshes off as soon as possible. And the two key predators for caterpillars we find are parasitoid wasps. So they're the lovely little fellas that lay their eggs inside the caterpillars and they grow up and they hatch out of the caterpillars. But a massively underrated predator is songbirds. If I, if I walk through my Brassica fields in the evening or early morning, they just erupt with songbirds everywhere. And the key thing there is we're never looking for no pests. We always want some aphids around, we always want some caterpillars around because there's no pests, there's no predators. When the pests do turn up, why would there be predators in that field if there hasn't been low levels? So we always want low levels of these pests. And then I'd, I would totally back up what Patrick said. Slugs are the biggest challenge. We have successes and failures with slugs. Vegetables are particularly vulnerable. Most people buy vegetables or when people go shopping for fruit and veg, they buy it with their eyes, not with their stomach, not with a nutritional mindset. It has to look perfect. And that is our biggest challenge with slugs. We can grow great crops, but the visual perfection is often affected by a slug presence. We find beetle banks very, very effective. And in fact potatoes and carrots we've got really, in that rotation, we've got really well established of 10 year old beetle banks and they are very, very effective against slugs. But we find with climate change and absolutely kind of biblical rainstorms, we find just like Patrick's talking about, the slugs will get past us. And that I'd say is one of the big weaknesses in our system. And then also I said, said about it earlier, deadwood, really good ground cover, untouched areas that never get touched by tractor, human foot machinery, chemicals, that's where the beetles really thrive. So we try and create those areas inside and outside, right through the cropping areas.

37:24

I love the way that you talked about needing to have a low level of pests because of course, as you said, that reductionist approach is you see a pest, you try and wipe it out, you try and get rid of it instantly. Whereas what you're doing again is that idea of farming the predators really it's about providing that food stock so that you can attract in the predators and then enough of them to manage those pests on your behalf. And also just to mention that the Nature Friendly Farming Network has a really lovely sort of booklet brochure for members around integrated pest management and the number of things that parasitic wasps are good for. Parasitoid wasps, I mean, I think almost Every pest is something that's predated on by those wasps. So they're really quite incredible. Thanks so much for that. Angus. Could you tell me about some the of. Of the pests that cause problems for livestock? I mean you detailed them briefly earlier, but just sort of talk about them a bit more and how you manage them at Peelum.

39:20

So the general ones that would have affected my youth flock and the cattle same would be things like fluke, coccidiosis and worms. They're the three that I really experience the most. All three of those are avoided by management. We're all guilty as charged of pushing a week's more grazing or you know, set stocking or expecting too much from our landscape, which is then in default stressing the livestock, pushing them too hard and compromises immune systems. And then they're exposed to the, the three that I'm, you know, fluke, coxie and, and worms. What I've found is by carving outdoors, by carving date hasn't really affected that, but I would definitely say by I start carving heifers middle of March. Cows will kick off 1st of April. Essentially the improvement in colostrum quality in the cows, albeit I've never had it tested, I can see it because of the improvement in the calves. The calves are just unrecognizable compared to where I would have been six, seven years ago.

40:16

And so are you breeding for this as well? Is there a sort of an epigenetic element where you're sort of culling and selecting for those particular traits that, that better colostrum, more resilience?

41:22

Finley, you kind of opened my Pandora's box there a little bit when it comes to really sort of, you know, the heart of my business. And it was something I really want to kind of have an open discussion with the other two about, with Andy and Patrick, because one of the things that I have in my business as a holistic I class regenerative cattle farmer running as close to a sort of relatively traditional abdi nangish hood, is that I have complete, relatively flexible and complete control over genetics. Both I would assume, and forgive me if I'm wrong on this one, Patrick and Andy would be sort of fairly reliant on steed suppliers and, and producers of seed to develop the genetics within the plants to deliver their outcomes in the landscape. And that's, you know, really fascinating point because I was going to ask Patrick, you know, whether that actually, you know, the species and the breeds or the varieties were selected, are they appropriate to be run in a low input system. Are there variances?

41:32

Patrick, can you, can you address that just in a sentence or two?

42:25

Yeah, I think the recommended list for especially cereal, wheat and barley seeds could take in a lot more factors than what it does at the moment in terms of inputs. And I think there is work to be done. We talk regularly with the seed breeders, you know, talking about what it is that we actually want. Help us to give us the tools, give us the seeds to grow that actually require less inputs as opposed to the one that is the big barnfiller that everyone puts their arm through at cereals and goes cool, that looks good. You know, give us the one that generates a margin and does better for the environment. Yeah, that's, that's, it's a very, very valid point.

42:27

And Andy, just in a couple of sentences for you.

43:02

Yeah, I mean the best example of that is so we have F1 seed which is we, we can't keep the seed from. That's produced every year by our seed producer, has its use uses. But if they're like man made benefits put on those crops. The more interesting subject is open pollinated seed. So and that is where, when, when you get the seed from that plant, every single seed, Even if there's 10,000 off one plant, every single seed is genetically different. Within that is different tolerances and resistances to funguses and to insect attack. So a hundred percent genetic diversity is absolutely key part of our approach.

43:04

Angus, back to you on genetics. I'm aware that we're, you know, running a little short of time, but let's go back to how you use genetics and dealing with those particular pests.

43:43

So I think the elephant in the room here Finlo, is that the more we develop our understanding of integrated pest management and it's controversial statement of the day for coming up right now, the more we develop the strategies on farm to integrate pest management, you know, integrated to manage pests, the less dependent we are on corrective inputs in the cereal world. Responding to Patrick there, one of the challenges is that, you know, ultimately a lot of the seed producers are in very close collaboration with a lot of the fungicide and insecticide and pest, you know, sort of the corrective input producers as well, to name a few. You don't have to go very far in my line of work work doing what I do with the cattle epigenetics is an extremely powerful tool. You know, if you're talking about a veg, you know, it's a permaculture business or some very similar to what Andy's doing where you might have 60 or 70 plus species and varieties of plant growing. Well, if I walk up onto my hill to see my cows, I might have a hundred different genetic variations over decade plus 20 years of breeding thing that are visually I can see them on the hill. So I, I look at my herd as a, as a, you know, looking as a broad spectrum. So it's got to be heard, consistency, focused. But I'm always recording my notebook never leaves my side. This thing is my bible. I'm always recording the cows that are delivering the KPIs I need. Okay, so first and foremost one of my primary ones is temperament, feet, udders, condition, scoring them throughout the cycle, the season. And unless that cow delivers what I need her to deliver, she doesn't stay in the herd fundamentally. And what that's delivering is delivering consistency across the board. But my approach to my herd management has been get my landscape sorted first and get the herd to work in the landscape, not the other way around. I think we're too inclined to adjust the landscape to suit the crop or suit the outcome rather than the other way around own. And the benefit and the bliss of having the butchery is that yes, okay, I can accept a 40, 50 kilo kill weight reduction in what I'm doing, but I'm, I'm achieving a herd consistency that is first of all demonstrating condition, scoring and output and performance despite or you know, alongside the paths I've been discussing in line with my system. So it's all well and good doing a deferred grazing, grazing operation where you're running tall grass in rotation. You've got to have a cow that can thrive on that because, you know, a lot of it's finastered, a lot of it's dying off. And you know, as Andy was saying, having dead grass in there is fundamental as well. It's, that's that spectrum of biodiversity, you know, that holistic approach to, to biodiversity. They need that stacked and tiered invertebrate balance there. So deferred grazing. But not all cows can thrive in a deferred grazing system. And so by selecting and culling out those cows actually allows me to develop that output in line with my IP Integrated Pest Management objectives. Because the butcher, I'm still killing cattle in under 22 months off a grass only system and all my cattle are out all winter.

43:54

You mentioned your notebook there and sort of constant recording. And Andy, presumably you're sort of constantly monitoring your system as well to make sure it's working. Is this largely visual for you or are you using sort of data collection tools as well.

46:59

It's both you know and I think you know the true, I'd say the most fundamental thing of assessing the system is, is what you end up with at the end of the day. It's been referenced lots of times. You've got to make a living out of it. It's not just a nature reserve. So the end product, that's my number one assessment. If it's up to size, it's high quality. And the system that I run has produced that for me and does that 12 months of the year and all the different crops, that's my number one measurement. Soil health growth, really, really important. We, we run just a pure cover crop based rotational system in all our outdoor cropping areas. So we do soil testing every year. That's really, really important. Crop vigor during the growth cycle is another for me that's an observational one. So I'm not measuring that, I'm just walking the crops and looking at it. It'll tell me how well they're doing. It's also any effect in crop vigor is normally an indication for us of some insect behavior. So I don't necessarily react but I can go and just monitor it, see if the predators have turned up and then we've been trying for many years now because there's not enough of them. We've actually had a full season long entomology study done on the farm. But they are like hen's teeth entomologists. But yeah and everything that I've talked about today I was absolutely blown away by the results we got off a 12 month survey. Particularly nice for me that the veg fields from the 1600 acres came up with the best results. But the farm itself is a standout farm in the southwest of England for insects which it bears out what we've all witnessed. But it's nice to get that, that scientific approval and data to back it up.

47:12

Brilliant. Look, we're coming to the end of the program but Patrick, thinking about other farmers who haven't yet started down this path, I just wonder if you could run through some key recommendations for them.

48:44

The first thing that strikes me about what Andy and Angus have just said is actually how important, important farmers skill is in terms of looking forwards especially in the arable sector as we lose BPs, we, we lose our, you know, that kind of that annual bailout, that paper over the cracks, you know, so the, the ability to farm in a way becomes so much more important. And a farmer's eye is far better than Any other, any test or any AI. You know, skill and experience is really important. So I think the challenge is on everyone to actually keep learning and keep studying what it is that you're trying to achieve and talking to other farmers. I think for me, people looking at this, thinking, you know, we're past the point of people thinking, oh, the Barkers and Pelham and you know, these are the wacky, the wacky outsiders. You know, this is the norm now, farming, trying to benefit the natural environment, not polluting, cleaning, all those sort of things. This is the norm and it's going to be the norm going forwards. So for the people who now look at it thinking, actually I need to be doing that rather than, than all, they're a bit weird. It's make the most of the hdb, made the most of the nature friendly farming network. There's a hell of a lot of information out there from people who are doing it and have figured out what works, what doesn't. You know, we're not, we all sit here talking about all the good stuff, but we've all found plenty of things that don't work as well and wished we'd done differently, you know, so that information's all there. I think it's, it's actually thinking like a proper businessman as well, which we haven't always had to do in farming. You know, it's know your margins, know your cost of production and, and make decisions based on that. You know, make sensible decisions. Do we need to spend money on this if we're only receiving 160 pounds a ton per week or you know, the other, all the other prices in the, in the, in the individual context. So just having a real thorough knowledge of the numbers is really important. And I think for me it's actually, it's, it's learn to love the wildlife and the natural environment and make sure you tell everyone about it as well. You know, the general public absolutely love the good news stories and for the most part a lot of what they hear is the bad news stories. And then if we can piece together good farming, good business thinking, good engagement with the general public and then get all our supply chains and our customers demanding this, wanting this, wanting it better and maybe accepting that, you know, that there may be a little bit more to pay, we then start to build a world where we can produce high quality crops with a high quality environmental output, really good quality livestock that actually tells a story and it's just a slow moving system change which we need everyone to be buying into.

48:54

Fantastic. Angus, what Are your top tips for integrating pest management into livestock settings?

51:13

Number one would be to have the confidence that actually we have the ability to do it. Farmers. Exactly. I absolutely can subscribe to everything that Patrick's just said. As a community, there is so much information. Go out there, get, get it and have the confidence to be bold, take that first step. At the end of the day, we have got to be businessmen, we've got to be business focused. And I think, as Patrick quite rightly said, we haven't necessarily had to be as shrewd historically as we do today in terms of how we manage cash, how we manage our businesses going forward. The biggest thing for me really is we must be resilient. Your business depends on it. It has to have 10 years of longevity. If you think that those inputs are going to compromise you any stage in the next 10 years or they're not going to be there. From experience, and I would assume that perhaps Patrick and Andy would agree with me on this one. From experience, it can take more than 10 years to adjust a system to do without something. And so if you can stress test your business input or factor in the KPIs that you need that are fundamental to delivering the outcomes you need to be viable long term where you're building natural capital, you're demonstrating at brilliantly, as Patrick and Andy evidently are. And I, I'm, I'm a bit behind the curve on doing full entomological surveys because up in the Scottish Borders we're lacking this resource. But I am up to my neck with ornithological work. So Grape archer conservation, grape arch monitoring curlews, some of my favorite bird species and those key indicator species are directly associated with strong entomological footprints. Get those KPIs in order and ensure that you're delivering a. We have to change climate. Change is, is on its way and it's, you know, we're kind of on the fringes of it, I believe at the moment. Be our landscape needs it, the people need it, they need to, as Patrick says, we need to see good value for their investment. Are we returning on the goods correctly? But have confidence the community's here. Farming's such an isolating industry, you know, it's so, you know, there's a lack of communication, it's growing for sure, but there is a lack of community and communication. And be confident, be bold. Go out there.

51:18

Angus. Thank you, Andy. Just finally you've got a system that works where nature is largely in balance. So what are your key recommendations for farmers starting down this road, I mean.

53:22

I think the big one, which obviously everyone on this, these interviews agrees with and farmers get better at it. Being nice to biodiversity is not a charitable activity. You know, a lot of the higher level schemes, farmers are going to know I'm doing a good thing for nature, shut that out the window. We're way beyond that. This is a seriously powerful tool for food production and I think it's really, it's really cool to understand there's two things like, like insects are your protective network on your farm. Cherish them, celebrate them, enhance them and direct them. 80% of world food crops are insect pollinated. This is not a nice to have. This is a critical survival subject for the human race. We have to reverse the destruction and it's mainly farming and I have to say, we're not getting better worldwide. It's getting worse and worse and worse. This is a critical subject. We have to be able to farm with nature or we're finished as a race.

53:33

Brilliant. Well, that's it. That is all we have time for. I'd like to thank my guests Angus Walton, Patrick Barker and Andy Dibbon. And I'd like to thank the Nature Friendly Farming Network for their support for this program. If you've enjoyed listening, please come back and listen to more. Tell your friends like us, review us and share our links. Farmgate is the world's highest ranking food security security podcast and we're part of89.com the Land Use News channel, which is supported by First Milk Pelican Ag, the Nature Friendly farming Network, Friars, More Livestock Health, Agrolo and individual donors. I've been Finlo Castane, bye for now.

54:28