Regenerative Agriculture Meeting Report
Last Tuesday, the group gathered at the Agri-environment Centre at Plumpton College to hear from a number of important speakers in the world of regenerative agriculture. Their insight covered a range of topics from grazing practices to arable techniques and opportunities for farmer collaboration.
First we heard from David Cornforth, who spoke to the group on how adopting mob grazing practices has symbiotically kept costs down while building soil resilience. David uses mob grazing techniques to feed his animals moving his livestock up to 4 times a day on minimum 45 day rotation. He simultaneously keeps a portion of his land free of grazing for up to a year to give the grass the best chance for recovery. Mob grazing practice needs to be setup with farm specific circumstances in mind. Factors such as field size, grass quality, numbers of livestock and intensity of grazing will all influence your rotation. David’s practice has seen a plethora of benefits to his soil including increased growth rates both above and below ground with an important expansion of root growth, increased quantities of soil organic matter due to the creation of humus and a promising presence of keystone species essential to the soil microbiome such as worms and moles. David encouraged farmers looking to get into such practices to use networks available to them such as the precision grazing organization, as well as online and literary resources in the form of YouTube and books.
We then heard from Richard Harding who delivered an intriguing talk on the different techniques for incorporating regenerative farming into your arable rotation. Again, he emphasized the importance of cherry picking techniques for you farm’s specific circumstance and the importance of aligning the techniques you want to undertake with your own rational and objectives. Due to the apprehension around terms within the field of regen, he was keen to encourage an omission of labels and a focus instead of the integration of conservation into agriculture. Understanding time scales was fundamental to monopolizing on such techniques. Firstly, he stressed the importance of knowing the timescales over which you regen-ag system would develop and not expecting too much too soon. Secondly, Richard spoke of the importance of optimizing on certain farming calendar timescales. One example of this was through his explanation of using cover crops after harvest. Harvest happens to be the moment, when we have the most amount of sunlight we could be using to grow our crops, but it is also the time when we take them all out of the ground. Richard instead advocated for the drilling of cover crops straight after harvest to monopolise on the sunlight and in turn maintain the soil’s health. Emphasis was also placed on reforming our perspective of cover crops as non cash crops to something you could make a profit from. Some final important takeaways was the importance of soil health to the farming system, the necessity to keep an open mind about the need to perhaps bring back aspects of your old farming system such as the plough and the need for an innovative and collaborative outlook to make regen systems work, perhaps through the sharing of knowledge or equipment.
Isabella Goggin from pasture and profit tied in nicely with this idea as she introduced the FIPL funded project. The Pasture and profit programme offers a space for farmers in protected landscapes to learn from their peers on a variety of different topics relating to grazing. With over 60 participants the group has benefited in hearing from a number of key speakers both through group workshops, webinars and the opportunity for 1-1 mentoring. The programme has funding to run until March and has a number of upcoming webinars and in-person workshops available to those who sign up. To find out more please head to: https://www.pastureforlife.org/pasture-and-profit-in-protected-landscape-programme-for-the-south-downs/.