'Regen is a chance to reset farm economics'

Hello, welcome to Farmgate. I'm Finn Locustain, the editor of 8.9.com at its heart, regenerative agriculture is an opportunity to reset a farm's relationship with both nature and economics. More than that, it's a chance to demonstrate to a somewhat skeptical public that agriculture can be a force for good, that food production can be fully integrated with climate action and a diverse and abundant natural landscape. Farmers come to regen for different reasons, but most who take the time to rethink their system, to reduce their use of expensive inputs, to mix livestock and crop production into long rotations, and to maximize the efficacy of free natural resources such as sunlight and water, find that they are more economically resilient, that nature thrives in their fields, and that they're just happier and healthier people. In this program, we're going to hear from four farmers who've unleashed the power of regeneration on their farms. We'll hear their stories and we'll ask what tools they've used to enable their success. I'm joined by Graham Rutherford from View Law Farm in Northumberland, by Verity Megginson from Kirkburn Manor Farm in East Yorkshire, by Rhys Jones from Pearse and Gape Farming Partnership in Cambridgeshire, and by Sian Jones from Molagnvor in North Wales. This program has been kindly supported by Regenerate Outcomes. Verity, let's start with your farm. It was conventional arable when you took it on six years ago. But you've said to me that you were horrified by what you found. What horrified you?

0:05

Horrified is quite a strong word, really. But Whartster was spent the first two or three years conventionally farming the farm and everything was just a bit of a disappointment. I was disappointed that with the chemical applications we were putting on, there was a huge mix of chemicals going into them, the smell of them, the frequency of the applications, the amount of fertilizer, the synthetic fertilizer that was going on, the amount of disruption to the soil that there was the constant turning of it over. And I didn't really understand the thought process behind that. It didn't make sense to me. We dug a few soil holes and there wasn't much life below ground and there wasn't much life above ground. The whole farm just sort of had a lack of life and a lack of energy about it. And I felt all the interventions that I was doing was to stop life as opposed to creating life on the farm. It was almost the opposite way around of how I felt farming should be.

1:30

And you said to me at one point that you were actually Sort of hiding inside when the spraying was going

2:25

on at times, to be honest, yeah, because of the smell of them. It's not with a lot of the chemicals. It's not a smell that your brain thinks is a good smell that you want to be inhaling, really. So human nature for me was to be to try to keep away from that. So why would I want to be eating the food that I was producing that had had something that smelled like that put on it?

2:30

Now, you're still arable, aren't you? But your system today is very different from what it was back then. So what are you producing in that system and where does it go and what's different?

2:53

I'm now a mix, more of a mixed farm. So I've integrated livestock in the form of sheep onto that. So the sheep raise the grazing cover crops through the winter. So they're out there at the moment on any fields that will go into a spring planting. So I grow spring wheat, which goes to Wild Farmed, which is milling wheat. I grow winter wheat that'll either be going to the local mill down the road in Driffield, or, depending what inputs it has that goes into it, that might go to wild farmed or another regen firm called Green Farm Collective. Break crop wise, it's either peas, linseed or oilseed rape. And I've also got some laying hens or the livestock side of things. That's all direct sales at the moment.

3:03

So you've got cereals and sheep and hens. And we'll talk more about hens a bit later as well. But that's. That's great. Thank you so much for that. Oh, actually, just. Just for the sake of clarifying, you know exactly what your farm is and that sort of. How big is it, how many acres?

3:50

So it's 330 acres and then I rent. In the summer months, I graze 50 acres of grasses for the sheep to lamb on.

4:04

Graeme, could you tell us a bit about your farm and your decision to transition away from cereals production altogether?

4:11

Yes, I farm in partnership with my brother Michael, and my father still involved. He's 85 now, still works every day. We would have been a traditional Northumberland farm historically. When my grandfather took it on. When I came onto the farm, we were. We were all arable. I think it was a system that didn't suit our farm. Quite heavy, sort of a heavy clay loan and with one or two Sandier patches in it. My father, I think he took the farm from being that traditional farm to being all Arable. And as Verity was saying, I think we soon found that we started to run into trouble as well.

4:17

And when you say traditional farm, you basically mean a mixed farm with a long rotation.

4:53

I'm thinking, yes, I would have thought sheep fattening cattle with a certain amount of arable. In an awful lot of farms in this area in the 1980s, a lot of them did plow up and push this chemical fertilizer root all arable. And we just found the more we did it, we had no organic matter going into the system that we found as well, that the soil became harder to manage, more unworkable. We were putting power harrows through it. I'm going to say that we probably, you know, we weren't making a great job of, if I look how, how that developed. We tried to get different cultivation systems into play, come away from the power harrow, try and minimize that damage, but it was a real struggle. We found in wet years as well, it didn't cope well with that. It would sit wet sometimes we would have some fields that would perform and other ones didn't. So it became financially quite difficult as well.

4:58

So I think now is very different.

5:54

Yes, you know, we, we introduced grass back into the rotation, but that was still being plowed out at times. Then in 2005, we took the decision to go organic. It wasn't because I wanted to be an organic farmer. I think we saw the conversion money and saw that as an opportunity to get the fences back in place, get a lot more grass back in, just, just push the farm back in the direction that it used to be in. So, you know, we are, you know, we made the mistakes ourselves and now we're on that process really, of trying to repair the farm and maybe to a certain extent get back to where we were when my grandfather was here.

5:56

So. So just tell me how big the farm is and, and what you're now producing on it.

6:35

Yeah, well, I'm at View Law, so view law is 475 acres. In 2010, myself, my brother decided we wanted to a farm next door came up for sale. We bought that farm. So we're now farming 875 acres, but we have a big mortgage because of that. So, you know, although we're organic and a low input system, we do have to push things quite hard. So we added a poultry laying shed on in 2016, so that adds a good income stream. So, yeah, that's where we are now.

6:39

And what else are you producing apart from the poultry?

7:14

Fat lambs and a lot of lambs are sold store, then fat cattle. And again, we sell a lot of store cattle. And yeah, we have the 12,000 hens. So the organic eggs go down to Lints hall in Durham and it's all

7:17

grass that you're using there for the sheep and the cattle. You're not growing cereals to feed them as well?

7:30

That's right. We don't have any cereals on the farm now in 2020 was our last harvest. I think when we realized that we quite liked selling a lot of store animals, that suddenly meant that we didn't need to be growing fodder crops to fatten those animals on. And because we weren't growing the fodder crops, that meant that we didn't need to. We were following the arable on behind those and then back into grass. And we thought, no, let's just fatten as much as we can by August. If it's not fat, let's sell everything store. That means we don't need fodder crops, we don't need cereal crops. And now we are all grass, which is a system we like because we don't really like to plow anymore. So we'll just go in and repair ground if stocks make damage in the winter and we'll over seed if we think the pastures need, need a bit of rejuvenation.

7:36

And Graham, just very briefly I just want to ask you about, because one of the things I said in the introduction was the way in which a lot of regenerative farmers feel more financially resilient. They're less vulnerable to the vagaries of global markets and things like fertilizers, that sort of thing. You took that really rather brave decision to buy a whole new farm and get that, that great big mortgage. Are you finding, you know, that although obviously the mortgage is a stretch every month, are you finding that you are reasonably financially resilient now and more so than you would have been if you'd been carrying on in the old system?

8:25

We're certainly more financially resilient than we were as an arable farm. Absolutely. Then as we transitioned through, I think becoming organic was a big help. You know, there's not always a massive premium there, but there's no doubt there seems to be a market and there's one or two farmers in our area always looking for the store organic stock. So that has been good. So yes. And then adding the hands on, I think that was a decision because, yeah, something else that we need to help to pay that mortgage. The package is all an awful lot Better. And the regen side of things, not spending the money on the fertiliser, the seed, trying to cut as many input costs out as possible, all feels a positive move.

8:57

And as I say, we'll come back onto the poultry a bit later because I think that's an important part of your farm story. Rhys, tell us about your farm. How many acres? What do you produce? Where does it go?

9:37

So we're 1500 acres of predominantly arable ground 10 miles west of Cambridge on that sort of rolling handslope series clay country. We're producing arable crops predominantly, but we do have a local grazier who goes across all the COVID crops, some of the cereals in the spring, which are forward, and we're growing some herbal lays as well. So we're growing wheat, including wheat for wild farms, barley, oats and beans. Everything has a companion crop and we aim for everything to go for human consumption. My boss, Tom, who owns the farm, was a. Was a medic before he came back to the farm. He's very passionate about the links between soil health and human health. And so we grow. Everything is targeted for human consumption because growing for animal feed just feels a bit counterintuitive.

9:48

It's really interesting the way that wild farm seems to come up so frequently in conversations that I have with people about cereals and Araborn. It shows, you know, what a difference, what an impact that company is, is making across the board in providing just a bit of an extra. An extra bonus that kind of makes regenerative cereals possible. Presumably that's an important. An important element for you.

10:38

Yeah, absolutely. I think we feel that by growing to their standards, which are very similar to the standards we use across the farm anyway, that we're producing something better that delivers not just a better food product, but also delivers for the environment. And so it's nice to have that recognised in a premium. Definitely. And, yeah, from a profitability point of view, it's often the best gross margin on the farm and so it's very helpful.

11:00

Now, Sian, just sort of finally, could you give us an intro for your farm, what you produce, how big it is, you know, all those sort of basic statistics?

11:24

Yeah, sure.

11:32

Thanks, Finlow. So we're beef and sheep farm with my husband, Moyla Ganva, just above Sandroost in Conway, North Wales. So we're about under 850 acres, predominantly peat and clay soils, similar to Graham. Altitude ranges from above a thousand feet of the farmyard up to about 1500ft. Annual rainfall is about 1.2 meters. So it's challenging exposed farm, especially in winter, especially winters like these. So fundamentally we're grass based. Low labour system, highish stocking rates, so we can just make a decent income to be honest, on the per acre of land. On the sheep side we've got about 850 improved Welsh ewes. Lamb outdoors in April. Capture quite a lot of data performance recording part of the Welsh Hill ram scheme. Ewes are rotated. I say that, but we do struggle to keep ears behind electric fence. They just. They just don't seem to obey the electric fence at all. But we try our best to keep them rotated. Yeah. Twins go on to pre lamb rotation, single stay on silage, try and finish lambs off grass. Most go to dumbeer on the taste of different slam scheme. We do try and shut the lamb operation down in November but we are thinking maybe we'll try and get them off farm sooner just to maybe sell them the stores just to have a bit more grass for the ewes. We want to try and improve the lambing percentage of the ewes going forward. Winter about 200 ewe lands off farm. On the cattle side we're about 150 stabiliser cows. Everything's outside in April if the weather. Weather dependent. I say that quite a lot if the weather's okay.

11:33

And your key motivation for becoming regenerative was to try and cut your costs in the first stages. How have you achieved that? Where have those particular costs come down?

13:11

Yeah, costs and being more resilient as a farm and not to have to rely on expensive input costs like we saw with fertiliser a few years back. Just with the prices going so high. We just. At the time we were part of a grass check project and we were measuring grass every week and since cutting up completely cutting fertiliser from the grazing ground, we haven't really seen much difference to yield. Thankfully we're expecting it to go down and then hopefully go back up. But thankfully it stayed the same. Yeah. Other costs we've reduced is concentrate costs reduced right down. Only the young stock gets. The male young stock gets concentrates. Now we used to buy 20 tonnes of concentrates for the, for the ewes but they're now on a pre ammunition and get silage bales. Silage costs is another one we've managed to reduce. We only do one cut now of silage rather than two cuts. By deferring ground we've managed to kind of reduce it down to one cut of silage.

13:21

Yeah. It's really interesting to hear where those costs are. And you've sort of echoed something that Verity said early on, that even having taken the fertiliser out, you were expecting to have a yield penalty, a yield drop as a result of that. But there hasn't been, which is fascinating, isn't it? And I think there's clearly a lesson there for other farmers. Graham, you've left arable behind, as we've discussed, and, you know, here we are 20 years later. Tell me how you've designed your rotation and integrated livestock and poultry within that rotation to get the fertility back.

14:18

Well, we, similar to Sian there, we lamb and carve outside. The animals are set stocked for that purpose. Then as the summer goes on, we group the animals up and get a rotation going. So that rotation will go all the way through the summer until we sell the. The lambs, store our fat, the calves, and we'll probably group the sheep up into just two or three big groups, maybe 500 in a group. Sometimes the cows will join them and split all the fields up into various sizes. So we're trying to target the fertility into smaller areas. Then we have the poultry muck on the side, so we're getting about 350 tons of poultry manure coming out of the shed a year. We have bought ourselves a little fertilizer spreader and the local contractor is absolutely brilliant, but the size of his machine used to make us wince when he came on the farm. So we can follow behind the stock as well and put some manure on with our own spreader behind there. So it's just a targeting areas that aren't performing so well and it just seems to work quite nicely. As I say, obviously now just all grass, so there's no ploughing up to be done at all unless we damage anywhere in the. In the winter with the winter grazing. But we do try and we have got sheds available and on days like today, it's a shocking wet day today and the ground's really getting quite wet, so the cows are actually in the shed at the minute. So we try and cut a bit of silage through the summer to have that Plan B in place. I think it's important to have to be able to sleep at night. And, yeah, things are getting really messy, especially with the cows. We're quite happy to put the them in the shed for a short space of time or longer if needed. We're getting a bit of muck there as well.

14:50

And how. What sort of length is your rotation? How do things sort of follow through? How much rest is the land Getting.

16:31

Yeah, I mean, it varies. I mean, obviously the longer the rest, the better and it's something we're trying to do. And my brother next door, he was, he was starting to hit 80, 90 d days at certain times through the year, which is fantastic. But often in the summer, you know, we might have our fattening cattle moving around that might be as short as three weeks. I know that we're not getting the benefits of the deep root growth, what have you, but we need the animals to perform to a certain extent as well. So, yeah, anywhere from three weeks up to three months.

16:37

And are you getting, you know, you were talking about the roots there. Are you getting even, even this January, reasonable water holding capacity in the soil?

17:07

I think we have up until today. And, you know, I try and target the drier areas to put the stock on outside in the winter. You know, I've got. I'm lucky enough to have 90, 100 acres, which is pretty good, which can stand a lot of rain. It finally feels a little bit waterlogged this morning. And I do wonder about the grass types we have. Obviously we're, we're perennial rye grass and that's something we're looking at going forward. How do we try and get some deeper rooting, better varieties in there? Unfortunately, the rye grass always seems to want to dominate, but it doesn't create a lot of bottom either. And I think it's something we're really going to look at hard. Now, can we get some sort of good mat into the bottom of the grass, some deeper roots, some plants that might grow a little bit taller and hang on and not become that slimy, wet mess that rye grass can become in a wet period in the winter. So there's quite a bit of work to be done there.

17:15

Yeah, it's interesting sort of getting that succession sorted, isn't it, so that other stuff can get through the rye grass. Yeah, interesting. And you've sort of talked about the way in which your, your hens in particular are important for delivering financial stability. And I just wonder if you talk to me about, you know, how many hens you've got, how you manage them and, and why they're so important in your system. Yes.

18:09

I mean, it's different to the rest of the farmers in it that we've gone sort of low input. But the hens are, although they're organic, there's 12,000 in the shed. They are quite an intensive system. We always describe them as being a little bit like a Formula One car. You know, they're going along nicely. They're performing really well, but you've got to manage them very carefully because you don't want the wheels to come off. My brother looks after them, Michael, more than I do and he's very good at the detail. So, yeah, 12, 000 hens, organic eggs. As I say, going down to Lints hall, we do find that most flocks, if they're performing well, they do leave us a very good, good margin. So that is also, as you can imagine, good for cash flow. Got that egg check coming in every week, so it's completely different to the cattle and the sheep. So that is a huge help.

18:29

I guess that's a really important part of it, isn't it, that you're getting a payment every week rather than having to wait years?

19:17

Yes, that's right. No, that's been really, really useful. We've got a, you know, obviously a good contract in place at the minute. That contract's got a feed link on. So if the feed price goes up, the egg price moves up with it. So, again, that's slightly different, isn't it, with the sheep and the cattle, where we're never just 100% sure what price we're going to get. So, you know, that's all in place. So if things are performing well, it's giving us a good, steady income, a good margin, and it's not affected by the horrible weather we're getting today. And if there's a negative side, if they go wrong, they can lose money fast as well. So, you know, we've had that happen with one flock. Yeah, it was quite scary just realizing how much of a drag could have on the rest of the farm if

19:23

it's not going to going well, it comes back to that sort of formula, one point, isn't it? Yes. When it's going well, it's going really well, but if it goes wrong, then it's. It's a nasty accident. Yeah, really interesting stuff. Thank you. And, Verity, I'm going to come back to you. And this is a bit of a curveball, I suppose, but it's. I was really interested in the conversation when we spoke before the podcast. You were a physiotherapist before you came, before you became a farmer. Do you think that there are similarities between the human body and the way that it works and the soil and the way that it works, the body

20:05

and the soil, they're incredibly similar. They're a system that's got certain needs. So the body and the soil, we need water, we need food for Nutrients and for energy we need sunlight, we need oxygen and we need temperature regulation for us all to survive and not become vulnerable to illness. All of those things I've mentioned, it's exactly the same for the soil and it's a balance of them. And if we can learn to understand more about the balance that we need in soil, we can then learn to feed the human body in a much more appropriate manner as well, to hope to reduce the problems that we have within the NHS with inflammatory diseases, with neurological problems, with obesity. The whole world's a system and we just need to learn how to balance that and the attention to detail and it will learn to propel itself in a much more natural way Then I

20:38

was interested when you spoke, being an over 50 year old man, that you were comparing over 50 year old men with sort of conventional farming soils.

21:35

That's true. I still work as a physiotherapist part time now. And more and more within the clinic there are more and more, tends to be more males than females. They come into the clinic and they're all, if they're over 50, they tend, not everybody, they tend to be on a list of anti cholesterol medication, high blood pressure medication. And if you say to these patients, why are you on it? They just sort of say, I don't know, the doctor said I needed to be. So we seem to have lost the art of questioning, of wondering why are we high in cholesterol, why is our blood pressure, why are our blood pressures high? And then these same people seem to be on this medication and they might have to six months or a year, it might need to be increased, the medication they're on as well. But the patients tend to think that that's because the medication's working, but they're just becoming ill, as an aside. And so a lot of them are thankful to be on the medication, but then the ability to query as to why they ever needed it in the first place is quite a rare occurrence.

21:44

And the same with soil, that the soil just becomes dependent on the fertilisers that it's being fed, but the quality of that soil just degrades and degrades. And people don't question, they just assume that it's something that they need to do. And I'm interested. Just, you know, as an aside, I have asthma and over the course of the last 15, 20 years or so, I've just had my medications kind of increased and increased. You'd sort of, you take this medication and another and another and another. And I was determined about six months or so ago that I wasn't entirely convinced that these things were helping me. And I gradually just reduced and took them pretty much all out. And now it's just, you know, back to a single inhaler once a day, which is an incredible difference, taking those medications out and feeling healthier as a result. Because, as you say, you've got to question these decisions, question these things, because you know your own body, you know your own soil completely.

22:46

It's a system and it's a wheel that's got bigger and bigger that people are just being put onto. I'm not saying for a minute people should just stop whatever medication they've been put on. They need to obviously consult somebody medical about that, but they should at least be asking questions and questioning if they are on the medication, questioning what else they can do to help their bodies, possibly not need the medication or as much of the medication. And I don't think necessarily gps have the knowledge to tie all that up together. Obviously, as Reese was saying, Tom Pearson, he was a gp. If I was a patient and I was going to go see Tom, I'd probably get a very different answer from him about illnesses and medication compared with the vast majority of gps in the country. So I think, yes, we need to educate patients and everybody who eats food, but we also need to educate people who are in positions of authority and who are looked upon and have a certain amount of control within society. Figures like that, because they can spread the word and they're believable to patients who are needing this help, really.

23:39

Thanks so much for that, Sian. We were talking earlier, weren't we, about cutting costs and as part of that ewe lamb and carve outside, as I think you started to mention. How has that helped? How have you managed to maintain good health and welfare at the same time as cutting the costs from the outside lambing and carving?

24:48

Yeah, so, yeah, as I mentioned, we've used to buy quite a lot of concentrates for these and we planted 10 acres of Swedes as well for the ewes back then. But we've changed now with health and welfare, really. We found that in wet conditions, the sweets, they were all on the sweets and they were just getting lame, so we've gone away from that. They get 150bales of silage with due for the ewes every winter now. And yeah, pre lambing rotations made a difference just to keep the good quality grass for them just before they lamb vettom ad costs have reduced significantly less incidence of prolapse mastitis, joint lameness. We used to vaccinate for orphan that when we still am inside, it was just. It escalates, isn't it? So when she starts doing one, this one thing, there's another thing. And just. Yeah, no, with. It's a lot healthier, a lot nicer to be lamming them outside.

25:05

And presumably you have, you know, less need for sheds and electricity, that sort of thing.

25:57

Yeah, and labor as well, which is a bit of cost saving as well. Same with the cattle. If we can, we can carve them outside because we AI, we know we've got a pretty decent time frame of when each cattle calves, so we split them into box and then the ones closer to carve will go outside and they then start on the rotation.

26:01

Thanks Sian. You're also a demonstration farm, aren't you? Working with Farming Connect and you've been working to build genetics that are best suited to the farm rather than simply just to maximize production. And you mentioned AI before. What sort of traits are you selecting for and how does AI and performance recording help with this?

26:20

Yes. So we used to be Farming Connect demonstration farmers with that finished. But we still do quite a few projects with Farm and Connect. So we started recording individual eel performance as part of one of our projects. The aim was to make better perform informed breeding decisions to aid with ewe lamb selection. We used to just select ewelams by eye. So gone away from that and try and see with some data behind it. So we looked at you efficiency. I couldn't believe the efficiency difference within the flock. And so we looked at kilograms lamb reared per kilogram of ewe mated, which the average was about 56% but the range was between 20% and 107. So we had a lot of performing really well, but a lot performing shockingly so. So before we kind of went into looking at traits which we kind of just got rid of the least performing kind of the bottom 10% from the flock. Yeah. So with it with youth, it's about 815 proof dwellsh. About half of them performance recorded through the sheep genetics. We buy performance recorded rams recently using our own rams. We just use ebbs as a. As a tool really to select the traits with important traits are muscle and fat depth. So to make sure they can perform off grass and live on our farm, basically.

26:39

Thanks very much, Sian. Really interesting to have that explained. Very good. Well, we're going to take a break and when we come back we're going to focus more on the tools associated with regenerative Agriculture.

27:58

Hello, I'm Matt, part of the team at Regenerate Outcomes. Regenerate Outcomes run a program for British farmers that's focused on removing barriers to improving soil health and then rewarding farmers for the environmental benefits that they create through their farming practices. We were founded in 2020 and currently work with 100 farmers covering 60,000 hectares across England, Wales and Scotland. In terms of the key services we provide to farmers, there are three main components. Mentoring, measurement and verification. So, on the mentoring side of things, farmers in the programme work with other experienced regenerative farmers to further refine their management on farm. The purpose of this is to ensure that their transition to building soil health is as smooth as possible and appropriately staged in incremental changes that build on successes for farmers that are already made substantial management changes. The mentors then continue to work with those farmers to further optimise the system, to further optimise profits, build resilience and improve productivity. On the measurement side of things, every farmer in the program gets a rigorous soil carbon stock baseline when they join and then repeat measurement across their farm every five years. And then we take the measured increases in soil carbon, along with the evidence of management changes that the farmers have made through working with the mentor to generate high value verified soil carbon credits, which the farmers can either keep or sell. In terms of the key aspects of the program that really appeal to the farmers we work with, the mentoring program stands out as a key reason that people join. People like the fact that not only are they getting a baseline, but they're also getting someone who'll come onto their farm, who will work with them, who will understand their context and then discuss ways in which they can further get more from the system and what they're doing. It's not a program with blanket prescriptions where, you know, it's simply adopt this management practice or do this or do that, but rather helping every farmer succeed in their own way and using those successes to, yes, build soil health and therefore really help the farmer generate a carbon credits as well. In terms of the baselining side of things, one of the things that gives farmers a lot of confidence that they're getting a really robust baseline is down to the depth we test. So going beyond the typical 10, 15, 30 cm down to 60 cm routinely, which gives farmers the knowledge that as they build soil carbon down the profile, they'll be getting evidence of that. We could go deeper, but the further you go in the soil profile, the more variable it gets. And so 60 centimeters is kind of that sweet spot for farmers. And then in terms of the verification side of things, what we're focused on is ensuring that farmers have the most valuable credits to sell. And so that's why we've selected at the verified carbon standard, which results in credits that command a premium in the marketplace. So farmers can be looking at getting 60, 70, 80 pounds for their soil carbon credits, rather than maybe 30 or 40 or 50 pounds for farmers who choose to sell their credits. We're then able to assemble a group of credits, a cohort of credits from across the farmers in the program, and go and have conversations with much bigger buyers who are prepared to pay these sorts of premiums for carbon credits. And that gives farmers access to a market that they might not have the time or the volume of credits to access if they were to sell credits themselves. But I suppose the final aspect that really makes this an appealing option to farmers is the fact that the program is run at no upfront cost, so we cover all of those services and retain a share of the credits. And that means that farmers can access the programme without having to pay for the baselining and the verification, all those services up front themselves. If you'd like to find out more, get in touch with a member of the team through our website at regenerateoutcomes.co.uk.

28:10

welcome back. And as I said before the break, we are are here partly to talk about tools. And so, Verity, I'd like to start with you, if I may. I'd like to start with the issue of how you've addressed compaction.

31:21

So historically the farm's also grown potatoes. We all like potatoes, so that's fine. But it has left the farm in a state that have got several different compaction levels in certain areas around the farm. So we experimented a year ago and we subsoiled one field which ended up with us getting half a ton to the acre increase in yield for the wheat. So we decided this year to that ideally a low disturbance subsoiler to actually try and take the compaction layers out around the rest of the farm was an idea. So I've actually got a very clever partner and older son. So they adapted a Cultivating Solutions Rapid lift and turned that into a low disturbance subsoiler that we can also attach a roller on the back of. So it means all my cover crops this autumn I've been able to broadcast the seed on and then we've subsoiled behind it in one pass and they've grown with the drought considerations fairly well, really. And that's what the sheep are on at the moment. The first, most shallowest compaction layer was about 3 or 4 inches. So digging holes around the farm, we've gone to just take that compaction layer out just below that. At the moment it's worked. It would be good if it stopped raining because obviously it's just one tool in the book. I now need those roots to go down and keep the aggregate that we've got there and the soil formation there. So yeah, we could, we could do with a little less rain now, really.

31:33

It's interesting that the compaction was just at 3 or 4 inches. And you know, it just again, it shows, doesn't it, that it's so difficult when you've got, got an awful lot of rain hitting your land and that soil sponge is really just very thin, a very thin layer at the top until you've got rid of that compaction completely.

33:03

I've tried to grow the COVID crops so I was hoping that the COVID crops and the roots would break up the compaction layer. Whether it's because we had that year of very, very heavy rainfall one winter followed by the drought, or whether it's the fact I'm quite clayy land, but the roots just year after year couldn't get, get, get through it. Which is why quite disappointingly in my head I had to resort to putting some iron into the ground. But it's just part of a system and you have to decide to choose what's best for your context and go from there to try and get the living roots and the photosynthesis working.

33:20

As you say again, context is everything, isn't it? And I, you know, I. When you talk about the way that you've sort of had those bits of machinery fiddled with, I have a sort of Heathrow Robinson sort of notion in my mind in the way that that might work. But actually when you go to your Instagram and have a look at, have a look at the videos of these things working. In practice, it's more, I guess more like a kind of a train with different carriages, the tractor, one unit, another unit behind it sort of pulling in succession.

33:53

Historically or with conventional speak, they would call it a tillage train. It's just that it's very low disturbance tillage train to try and can have just the least number of passes possible. The roller is a bit too wide for the subsoiler, but it's the roller we've got, so that works fine. It's an 8 meter subsoiler, so it's a big Big, big subsoiler, which, with the drought this summer, we did have to take some legs off it because it did grind to a halt on occasions. But take a few legs off and took it back down to six meters and that worked fine, really.

34:22

And just for the sake of those people, again, who are listening to this, but they aren't necessarily farmers themselves. Just describe what a subsoiler is, what it does.

34:54

What you're aiming to do is basically put air into the soil and break up the compaction layers. So if you think of a. Almost like a cake, and in the middle of the cake you've got your icing. If you think of that layer of the icing as a compaction layer within the soil, where there's no air in it and no life in it, so it's very difficult for anything to get through it. So the subsoil has got some legs that have got a curve at the bottom of it, and you drop those down into the soil to the depth where you need them to be, just below the compaction layer and drag those legs through the soil. And rather than turning the soil over and ending up upside down, like a plough would, it just creates a ripple effect of the soil almost a bit like a very mini earthquake rippling through it. It's that ripple effect that you need, and if possible we. To need subsoiling, you need to run the tractor at the right speed to create that ripple effect. So it's quite a precise thing to do, otherwise you can cause quite a bit of damage and you get big slabs of earth coming up. So it puts air into the soil to give chance for the roots to get down and the life, but without turning the soil upside down and you ending up with your topsoil underneath.

35:02

And you were talking about within that train, having the seed broadcaster as part of that, to reduce the number of passes that the tractor was making. And presumably, again, that's about reducing the compaction from the machinery going over it time and time again.

36:13

That's correct. And we broadcast from the sprayer we've got. So that's the same tram lines. It then takes you into something, what's called controlled traffic. So you're trying to run over as minimal area with tyres and the weight of the tyres over the field as possible, again to reduce compaction.

36:28

Brilliant. So we've talked about tools in a couple of different ways, I suppose we talked about performance monitoring and AI and I hadn't really sort of thought, until Sian was talking about it then, that that's sort of using modern technological tools, isn't it? You're talking about, you know, tools which are much more conventional, much more traditional, but using them in a new way. And Rhys, we're going to talk about tools with you as well. But before we do that, let's talk about the machinery that you've got rid of on the farm. You did the whole big farm sale thing, which frankly is quite a leap of faith. Faith to see all that machinery going off the farm.

36:46

Yeah, to a degree. We, we didn't go too crazy too quickly. So we, we bought a small direct drill in 2016 and we moved every year a block of between 100 and 150 acres into direct drilling. And then up until 2024, I think the final block went, was direct drilled in autumn of 22. So by that point we were pretty really happy that we had a system that worked. And so, yes, in June 2024, we got rid of all the things that we had stopped using. So we still have a low disturbance subsoiler, a couple of seed drills, but we got rid of a lot of horsepower, a big class 750 challenger and yes, that's a big heavy cultivation rubber tractor and a big. We got rid of a tillage train as, as Verity said, we had this big nasty set of legs and discs and, and double D press and all sorts of cultivation kit that we just, we just hadn't used for years and was just. Was just sat at the side of the yard getting in the way. So yes, we, we did get rid of a lot of stuff, but with the price of machinery as it is in modern times, we got rid of a lot of stuff and all we managed to buy was one tractor and one wider seed drill. So again, as Verity said, we've. We've gone wider to reduce compaction. So we're controlled traffic farming now, which means we're in fixed wheelings. The kit moves on the same tram lines every year and then in the same drill wheelings in between every year. So our field traffic's gone from about 70% now down to around 25%, which means 75% of every field hasn't been driven on for nearly three years now.

37:22

And you talked about, you know, getting rid of the machines helps to cut costs. A lot of machinery these days is contracted rather than bought. But also it's the data sets, the it that's sort of used to help support those tractors and so on that have costs as well. Have you managed to reduce costs in

39:03

that way too, from an IT Perspective, we modernized a little bit so we're probably actually a little bit more vulnerable to having to have someone come and put a laptop on a tractor when it breaks. But what it has allowed us to do is, is be more efficient with our input. So that modernizing meant I've got better precision farming equipment. So I can do variable rate seeding, variable rate fertilizer, and I can bring the data back into my farm management software so I can highlight zones that are underperforming and think, well, perhaps I should, should just stop farming that corner because it's a waste of inputs and do something that's better for nature which then you know as well as the nature benefit benefits me because I'll have some beneficial insects and what have you which can go back into the crop and perform a job.

39:20

We just talked about, you know, one or two of the bits of machinery that you've got, the direct driller. You got rid of lots of horsepower, lots of machinery, tractors and, and that sort of thing as well. Just talk me through the machinery that you've got on the farm now, would you? And, and also just for the sake again of people who aren't farmers, just very briefly explain, I think we have done before, but, but just very briefly explain what a direct drill does, what it means.

40:06

Yeah, of course, yeah. Machinery is my happy place, so that's not a problem. So we by kissing out a lot of horsepower and by moving to direct drilling, which means we don't do any cultivation or seed bread preparation apart from some targeted subsoiling where I find a problem with a spade.

40:28

So no plowing?

40:43

No, no plowing, no inversion tillage, just removing compaction in targeted manner where I don't think a cover crop's going to cut the mustard. That means that we're much more efficient because the only thing I ever do in a field is drill. So we've cut out a lot of fixed costs and now just myself and Shona who works with me are able to keep on top of 1500 acres. Aside from a bit of help in the summer. Yes, we have a direct drill which is a horse avatar. Then we have a low disturbance subsoiler. I have a second weaving tine drill which is just another option if, especially with grazing cover crops on heavy land. Sometimes there might be a little bit of surface capping where, where their hooves have made a little bit of damage and the time drill pulls nicely through that and alleviates that sort of 2 inch problem. We also change some bits on our combine harvester so I Don't remove any straw from on the farm which when you're then not cultivating means there's a lot of residue left over which I've got to plant crops through. And so we have got a Macdon header, it's like a, a flexible header which means I can cut my crops really high up. So I leave maybe 50 plus centimeters of straw which means I don't have the chop straws. Try and plant through. And we also change the, the chopper on the back of the combine so the straw coming out the back which isn't being bailed has to be shredded in some manner. And we have a sort of uprated more powerful chopper which spreads it further and chops it even finer which makes it easier for me to plant through.

40:45

And Reese, one of the things that we've, we've discussed on the podcast before is this sort of conflict or conversation perhaps between the use of a plow and the use of glyphosate. You're using a bit of glyphosate in the system that allows you to maintain a system system with that sort of constant cover without having to plow and turn the soil over. That's correct. Is it?

42:23

Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't say that I like using glyphosate but it's a useful tool which as you say allows me to have this constant cover. You know, without reliable frosts or deep long lasting frosts. It would be especially on our soil type. I think it'd be very difficult for me to grow a cover crop over winter and then be able to you get rid of it before planting a spring crop because often perhaps it's a climate change thing, I'm not sure. But spring changes so quickly. We go from horrible wet clay plasticine to baked out and dry and there's no point within there where I could probably cultivate to get rid of some green materials. So yeah, it allows us to bring livestock into the system to graze it back and then any regrowth I can get rid of and not have to release carbon through cultivation. And I have no idea which is the worst of the two evils, but that's the easiest for me for sure.

42:43

And just tell me about residues and how quickly that glyphosate is eliminated in the system. In your view, do you think there's any risk of residues existing on the food that people consuming?

43:36

So I don't use glyphosate for any harvest desiccation, which I think would definitely be the main source of residues on any food so there's always a long time period between glyphosate which has been applied not to the thing that's ever going to be eaten. I would like to think a healthier soil that's more biologically active is also going to break down that active ingredient quicker. I don't have proof of that, but it makes logical sense and so I don't. Yeah, I think residue shouldn't be a problem. I don't. It's easy for me to say because I'm in a very dry part of the country, but harvest desiccation seems like a very irresponsible use of life, so something that, you know, we're all quite reliant on.

43:47

Yeah. And as you say, you're using it right at the other end and a fairly small, small amount just to sort of knock off those. Those cover crops at that point. Verity, I think that Reid mentioned his header, but in particular you found that your stripper head is something that's pretty revolutionary in your system. What's a stripper header and why is it useful?

44:24

So a stripper header is just a different type of header that goes on the front of the combine. And what it does is it literally strips just the grain off the straw. So once you've combined the field, you're left with the whole of the straw, bit of the plant, the stem of the plant standing tall still within the field. So compared with Reese's Mac Don header, it'll leave even more of the standing crop there. This year we didn't actually use it at all because financially I decided that we needed to bale whole of the farm, which is a bit sad for wanting to increase the organic matter. And now it's raining like it is so much outside. It would have been nice to have been able to use the stripper header at the moment because it means the standing straw would have still been up in the field where then I would have broadcast the grazing cover crops onto. So it means, especially for grazing the sheep, that straw would have been slowly breaking down through winter and the sheep are standing on it and it just saves the detriment if there is going to be any compaction to the soil that the sheep. Sheep can create. It's like it gives the soil a nice biological blanket, really. And the straw breaks down at a slow rate again, like Reese said, he's on his combine, he's had an upgrade to the straw chopper. When you get. If you chop straw to try and keep the straw in the soil, you can end up with quite a matted layer of the straw that's quite difficult to incorporate and then you can start to get the soil becoming deoxygenated and problems with slugs and things like that. So the strip aheader can potentially give you other problems with hairpinning of the standing straw. So it means when you're coming to drill you can sort of miss bits of drilling. So it's a balance really of an idea and again, context, using it where it's appropriate. But I'm looking forward to this harvest, having the chance and hopefully the right conditions to be able to use it again. I'll let you know how it goes.

44:45

Brilliant. And in terms of the sheep cover crop that's going in, what sort of mix have you got there for the sheep to eat from?

46:42

So that was a ten way mix. I've been trying to increase the diversity as much as possible. So it had a couple of different types of clovers in black oats, tillage, radish, some mustards. I wouldn't say the clovers have grown particularly well because it was just so dry when they went in, but there's definitely seven of the species that have come through that. The sheep that are out on the COVID crops grazing out there look much healthier than the ones that are on the pure grass in the paddocks that I've got at the moment. There's no lamenesses, which is interesting again with Sian's comment about the stubble turnips. And I think just like us, we need to eat a diverse range of foods and putting sheep onto just what's a mono crop, maybe that's why they tend to get illnesses compared with this diverse range. So. And I also put some winter pea into the mix as well, which is growing quite well.

46:50

And although we usually think in terms of machinery and then also AI and data sort of monitoring and collection as tools, knowledge is also a tool, isn't it? Verity, how did you learn about regen in the first place?

47:47

Obviously I had my sort of shock to the conventional system and decided something needed to change to make me be proud of what I was producing. And I happened to come across Gabe Brown's book Dirt to Soil and listened to it in the car. Sent Gabe a couple of emails and questions to which he responded very quickly, which I was surprised, and he put me in touch with regenerate outcomes and so I joined them for their carbon scheme. But through that you also get a mentor who is Kyle Richardville, who's always a ray of sunlight and positivity because starting out in this you get sort of quite a lot of negative comments really and ideas. So it's important to surround yourself with like minded people who can encourage you with ideas and that you can ask questions from questions and questions is learning. I've listened to a lot of podcasts with John Kemp and then I got some funding from the Royal Countryside Fund to have a one to one with Tim Parton, who's quite prolific within the regenerative scene. So he's now one of my two man band of agronomists. So I still have a conventional agronomist and I have Tim as well. It's important as you're making a transition to within regenerative, not to instantly think that everything to do with conventional was always wrong because the farm won't cope with it. It is a transition and a learning curve. So having the two agronomists, it's quite difficult to match them up at times. But as long as everybody's open and they'll have a conversation and chat about things, then it's interesting having the two different types of brain work things out. Which is the best thing for the farm, really. It's questions and being with positive people.

48:00

Positivity really is, is important, isn't it? And you mentioned Tim Parton there 18 months or so ago. I did a podcast, I think it was with Joe Stanley before we were doing Wheat from the Chaff, if people want to scroll back through their podcast feeds with Tim Parton and Joe looking at the issue of cereals. And we spent quite a bit of time talking about glyphosate, just sort of referencing back to that conversation earlier on with Rhys. And Tim had been doing quite a lot of residue testing in his soils. He'd been checking to see whether there was movement of the glyphosate through the soil and whether it was getting anywhere near water courses and that sort of thing. And his own experience with the way that he was using and applying glyphosate was that any residues he believed were basically being got rid of within about a fortnight. So it's just important and interesting to hear that again. And as I say, if people are looking for that, there's another podcast, I think at Groundswell, when we did Groundswell in the field with Tim, but it's the one before that that I'm talking about now. Graham, you've gone through the MSO process with Nethergill Associates, haven't you? The Maximum Sustainable Output process. How did that help you?

49:45

Yes, I heard them speaking on a podcast and what they were saying, it matched in with what we were trying to do anyway, I think. So got in touch with them. I think we're looking to try and get a bit of confidence in what we were doing at the time. We were thinking about dropping the sheep numbers and introducing some, some cows into the, the system. We do benchmarking through AHDB as well and sometimes a lot of the figures on the cows didn't look too good. So yeah, we spoke to Chris and Brian at Nethergill and they said an awful lot of the farms that they'd been dealing with, they found that the better balance of cattle and sheep were the more profitable farms they dealt with. So, you know, we gained that confidence from them. So after that we started to push the sheep numbers down and introduce the cows and we've now got a, as I say, we went from 2000 sheep and no cattle. So we now have 100 cows and we've dropped the sheep numbers down to 1500. So that was all really with the help of Nethergill. With that, we were having a good look at the corrective variable costs that we were introducing into the system. We had quite high vet and med costs with the sheep. We founders who've introduced the cattle and dropped the sheep numbers. That old thing it, our old saying of the biggest enemy of one sheep's another sheep, I think is certainly proven to be true here. We seem to be getting the medicine costs down on the sheep side. The medicine costs on the cattle look quite sensible. So yeah, that's been a huge help I think just trying to get the stocking rate down a little bit. Chris and Brian said to us, for every extra pound we were bringing in on the farm past the point of MSO, it was quite costing us a £79. So that just seemed a little bit crazy really. So we're trying to come down to that sweet spot where we're maximizing the output of the farm whilst bringing in as little cost as possible. The nearer you get to that sweet spot, the harder it gets. Well, I would like, I'd love to eradicate all medicine costs, but you could imagine when you speak to your vets, start seeing that you're not going to do any clostridial vaccinations. This sort of thing, they tend to pull a funny face at you. So, you know, you've got to be sensible with it as well.

50:53

It's always a journey, isn't it? And often, you know, as you say, with some vets, it's a journey for them too. Because it's, it's new for them. And then there are other vets, of course, who are sort of pushing in the other direction. So it's interesting the way that that balance works and rotation, you know, if we're sort of finishing off this little sort of section on tools, rotation is a tool as well, isn't it? You know, it's one of those that's kind of existed, you know, for hundreds and hundreds of years for building fertility, for improving water cycling. So, Rhys, I just wonder if, you know, you could talk me through your rotation and also tell me a bit about your compost, which I think you produce yourself, don't you?

53:02

So our rotation is not fixed, which I think is probably a big part of the regen journey is it can't be rigid because I need to use my rotation for lots of different purposes.

53:40

So adaptive. Like adaptive multi paddock.

53:53

Exactly, exactly. So we're in black grass country. We're quite good at growing it, but getting a lot better. And I use rotation a lot for. For weed control. And so first wheat is always our most profitable crop. We're always trying to work out how we can get back into first week. And second weeks can be. Be nice and profitable too. But if there's a problem, then I'll flick to a spring crop or I'll rest a field where I'm just going to make more work for myself and not make any money. So we're using. We're probably ended up around 50 spring cropping now, which traditionally we'd have been 75 autumn cropping between wheat and or seed rate. But by moving those out, it's brought more cover crops in, which means more fertility, which is also hopefully, as we transition into the foot, deeper into this rotation is also meaning more first wheat and less second week, which is helping with profitability as well. And then like, yeah, from a fertility point of view, as well as the water cycling cover crop, more. More cover cropping, bits of herbal lay more deep rooting species. That's all, that's all helping and bringing organic matter back in then compost is, yeah, a bit of a guilty pleasure. So our reasoning is that I'm very aware that most things I do on the farm have some kind of consequence and especially my use of chemicals and fertilizers. The label says they're safe, but obviously there's some kind of detrimental effect beyond the target. And so the idea is that we make small batches of very microbially active and diverse compost and then sort of throwing custard at the wall and seeing what sticks, because I'm gonna have harmed some things and, and reduce the population of some things. And so I'm just constantly trying to put them back. So on our seed drill, I have a liquid applicator system where I can take this compost, run water through it to extract the microbes, and then they just get applied directly on top of the seed when I'm planting. Because all these things are soil microorganisms and they don't like UV light. So the best thing to do with them is put them back where they came from. I have no specific evidence. It just doesn't cost me hardly anything. I collect materials from the farm, put them together using the Johnson sue method, and it takes around a year for this cage I've filled to go from a foot above the top to sort of 2 to 3 foot in the bottom. And between some materials that are lingering on the farm anyway and a little bit of my time, I wouldn't have a number for what it costs per hectare, but it's very low, so it feels like something that's sensible to do alongside some carbon sources and amino acids and things that I put down with the seed.

53:55

Brilliant. Thanks so much for that. Now we're coming towards the end of the program, so we're going to start to wrap up. And Graham, you've clearly changed a lot and achieved a lot. What's next for you? What still needs to be done to become as regen and resilient as you can be.

56:37

Yeah, I think we'll just carry on on the route of getting the stocking rates correct. I think sometimes we've been overstocked. It just leads to shocks in the system. Want to get that right? So then we can make our all our own hay and silage and have those plan B's in place for the winter grazing. I think we're going to continue on looking at the grass types, as I mentioned, adding a bit of diversity into that and getting these, hopefully, a better sward to do the winter grazing. The summer is huge. A, the summer is a lot easier than the winter, obviously. We've put a lot of hedges into the farm. I would like to finish that process off. We've added quite a lot of trees, but really I would like to get more trees in for shelter purposes. We can be quite open in the winter. I know I might not see the full benefit of that in my lifetime, but I think it's something that wants to be done. We'll see how the environmental schemes develop, continue to engage with those as well and hopefully they'll give us a little bit of a financial push to do some good things.

56:51

And Rhys, when we spoke previously, we talked about the need to demonstrate regeneration. As I mentioned earlier on, there is this sense that regeneration is something that is at least being discussed across the country in farming magazines, no matter how mainstream they are, that more and more farmers are starting to dip their toes in a more regenerative direction. How do you know? Show that your farm is delivering regenerative outcomes.

57:48

So from a data point of view, I have some quite nice soil sampling that tells a bit of a story. And then as we progress through the regenerate outcomes program, we've had a carbon baseline and hopefully in five years time through helpful mentorship and the things we're doing, I'll have a demonstrated improvement at the end. We also took part in a pilot with Regenefied, which is Gabe Brown's verification auditing company and we got given tier three out of five. So that was a nice sort of pass on the back that we are doing regeneration in their eyes. And it's USDA accredited in the states so can't be too much fluff. And then there's always the simple things as well. So the, you know, the things you can find just by taking a spade out. So my, my field traffic ability has definitely improved. I don't find that, that, you know, I can take the sprayer out a little bit earlier and I don't make ruts. My water infiltrations improved, my worm counts definitely have improved. And then we're also part of a couple of different trials that are looking at insect numbers and bird numbers and we see good numbers of red listed birds, lots of insects and, and in comparison with local farms which are either conventional or however they choose to farm and we measure favorably against them. So I think there's plenty of simple measures you can look at to reassure that we're delivering what we think we are.

58:17

That's brilliant. As I say, I think it's really important. But one of those questions that often gets asked by non farmers in audiences when I'm doing panels is they seem to sort of see farming as, you know, you've got a destination in one direction. The conventional, this is what I conventional farm looks like. And a regenerative farm is completely different. It's sort of at the other end. And it's that whole sort of element, isn't it, that regeneration is a journey, it's not a destination. Even when you think that you've got as far as you can, there are still tweaks that can be made, still improvements that can be made. And so it's that idea that regenerative agriculture is about regenerating rather than regenerated, if that makes sense. You're not going to get to that sort of past tense form of the word. And so if you're able to demonstrate and observe those changes, those improvements year on year in the things that you're talking about, then of course that's regenerative. It's fairly simple. Now, I think, Verity, I know it was Graham, wasn't it, who was talking about trees and the way in which you were wanting to stick more trees in in order to help with the shelter. And of course, Sian, you're on hill land as well, and this is sort of slightly outside the scope of what we've been talking about so far, but because in Wales there has been relative controversy around sort of getting agroforestry in place, getting more trees on farms. There was this sort of big conversation over the course of the last couple of years, sort of talking about the sustainable farming scheme. This is something that I know that you're quite interested in. The agrofore forestry is something that could help deliver a range of improved outcomes for the farm. You are on a hill farm, if not on a mountain. But I understand you've actually had some trouble with tree planting support in Wales.

59:41

Yeah, sounds ironic, doesn't it, with a lot going on with Welsh governments? But, yeah, we've got small pockets of woodland on the farm and we're wanting to just join them up, link them up, link the habitats, increase shelter. We'd like to put some hedges in before it's just getting the. It's getting the scheme from Welsh government. So it's National Resources Wales that maps the Welsh government ewes. And there's a constraint area on the whole farm. It's a constraint with ground nesting birds, which we fully appreciate, but there isn't any ground nesting birds on the bottom of the farm, it's all at the top and it's obviously on the bottom of the farm. We want the shelters. So, yeah, it's been really, really frustrating going around in circles with Welsh governments trying to get them to change the maps to be able to access the funding. We've had a biodiversity report done to strengthen our point that there's no ground nesting birds, but, yeah, to no avail, unfortunately. Welsh government won't change the maps, so we've been planting hedges ourselves and it's something we have to do and need to do. It's just a shame we're missing out.

1:01:25

And it just shows the importance, again, doesn't it, of governments and bureaucracies understanding context and actually being able and prepared to update their maps and, and, and take account of, of what's actually happening and what's actually there. Although you have had funding, I think, for some of the woodland that you've planted over the course of the last few years.

1:02:28

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, we have, yeah. But it's, it's densely packed with woodland rather than. And we have to exclude stock from there for 12 years.

1:02:45

Okay.

1:02:52

It just, it just, it'd be nice to integrate it more with animals and do more of the agroforestry and not so densely packed.

1:02:53

Another example, I always think, you know, that, that farming itself, when you have innovative farmers like yourselves, the innovation is there on the land before academia follows it and measures it and understands it fully and before policymakers kind of catch up to these things. So it's always that slight frustration, isn't it? But it's wonderful to hear what you're doing and indeed what all of you are doing on your farms because it's such important work and it's great to hear about how you do it. Look, that's it. That's it is all we have time for. I'd like to thank my guests, Sian Jones, Verity Megginson, Rees Jones and Graham Rutherford. And I'd like to thank Regenerate Outcomes for their support on this episode. 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 podcast. We're part of89.com, the land use news channel, which is supported by First Milk Pelican Ag, the Nature Friendly Farming Network, Network Friars More Livestock, Health, Agrolo and individual donors. I've been Finn Locustane. Bye for now.

1:03:00