Month: July 2024

Environmental stewardship schemes, which DEFRA manages, aim to encourage farmers to put land aside to improve wildlife and reduce farming’s impact on the environment. As part of our role as custodians of this special area of Sussex farmland, we’ve embraced some of these schemes to help protect the environment. Cameron Lewis, our MD, shares details of some of the environmental schemes we’ve adopted on the Farm and the benefits we’re seeing.

Farming in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way is very important to us. Being part of national environmental schemes matches both our vision and mission as an organisation. There are clear benefits of taking part – for both the land, and our culture as a business. There’s also, it has to be said, an element of income support for the farm – which helps too!

We’re currently signed up to a 5-year Mid-Tier Countryside Stewardship Scheme, which runs until December 2026. We’re also part of a 3-year Sustainable Farming Initiative which runs to the same timeframe.

What’s involved in environmental schemes?

All schemes require a significant amount of additional work. This can range from additional soil testing to measure soil health, to planting specific seed mixes on a specific piece of ground that will feed birds through the winter months. We’ve got a number of measures in place that enhance our natural hedgerows and create wildlife corridors that shelter the smaller birds and mammals on the Farm. Other measures like planting winter cover crops or herbal grass leys help to reduce nutrient leaching into the water courses and lower the risks of soil erosion during heavy rainfall periods. We treat the management of these schemes like any other cash crop to ensure the measures we sign up to are effective and get the right attention through the farming year.

What are the benefits of taking part?

Over the last 25 years of being certified organic and participating in the numerous environmental schemes we’ve seen a huge increase in wildlife diversity. This is across the food chain too – from birds of prey to the insect life and improvements to soil health.

We’re very much in favour of these schemes. They’re always evolving, have generally improved and are easier to tailor. Getting a balance of farms in the UK producing food for the population as well as looking after the environment is challenging, but so important.

We’ve also gone further with some of our own environmental projects too, from installing solar energy for use on Farm, to working to ISO14001 international standards for environmental management. This acts as a framework for the business in setting continuous improvement goals and reducing our impact as a business on the environment we live in.

What’s next?

We’re keen to get more involved and sign up to more measures that will help the bio-diversity within the Farm estate. We’re also working on a Group-wide project to set out our longer-term plans around the environment, sustainability and how we govern the business to ensure these areas progress into the future.

Reflecting on life down on the farm, John Pitts, our owner and fourth generation farmer at Woodhorn, shares some of the latest developments.

We have taken another positive step on our sustainability journey with the installation of solar panels at Reeds Farm which will provide renewable electricity to the dairy.  Our main demand for power comes from the milking parlour, the hot water required for milking plant sterilisation and the milk cooling in our bulk milk tank. In addition, our new pasteurisation plant will be entirely powered by solar energy, so hopefully another positive for those of you enjoying our milk from The Oving Cow Shed!

Our main use for electricity at night is for lighting in the cow sheds when solar panels are asleep. We are about to upgrade all of our lights which will be significantly more energy efficient and will then consider installing a commercial battery storage system so that these too can run on solar power.

Harvest is approaching, although expectations are rather low this year following the incredibly wet winter and spring. Wet, cloddy seed beds inevitably meant that plant populations were low on emergence with many seeds not germinating. Across the country many thousands of acres were not able to be sown at all, so the farm team at Woodhorn did extremely well in the face of one of the most challenging springs in memory.

Continued wet weather created enormous disease pressure in all our crops and even conventional farmers, with the massive armoury of chemicals at the disposal, struggled to control the likes of septoria tritici in wheat and crown rust in oats. Being organic and chemical-free means that ‘disease years’ (like this one) significantly reduce our yields but one might argue that the ‘gap’ between Organic and Conventional farming systems is even more stark when the amount of chemicals applied is so high on other farms.

Whilst the subject matter of these articles is naturally governed by the title ‘Down on the Farm,’ I thought I would give a mention to our teams on our green waste sites at Tangmere and Runcton. Wet spring and summers inevitably generate more garden waste than normal, and this puts huge pressure on everyone during a time of year that is already extremely busy. What is more, the active composting material that has sat on-site over the winter is, inevitably, incredibly wet which has made screening the finished compost at best extremely challenging and at worst impossible. I often refer to the dedication of our farm teams and the same very much applies to all our staff involved in the composting enterprises. Thank you, all of you!

We are on course to process over 110,000 tons of waste this year, all of which would otherwise have been landfilled and as most of you know, we turn this into a variety of peat-free soils and compost mixes which we retail through our Earth Cycle brand. We are also currently providing c.8500 tons of a bespoke British Standard peat-free topsoil mix for the new sports pitches at Shopwyke Lakes, which have suffered significant delays due to the wet weather – are you noticing a theme to this article?!

Until autumn…