Author: Emma Cooper

Embracing new environmental schemes

Posted on July 25, 2024 by - Blog

irrigation

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.

Hedge Laying

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.

Down On the Farm – July 2024

Posted on July 18, 2024 by - Blog

cows in farm shed

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!

solar panel in field

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!

green waste being recycled

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…

The future of farming – climate change and the impact on operations

Posted on May 30, 2024 by - Woodhorn Group

grass picked up by machines

To remain sustainable as a farming business we must clearly adapt to the changing climate and increasingly extreme weather patterns that we’re now seeing in the UK. Cameron Lewis, our MD, looks at some of the steps we’ve been taking to evolve our operations to better cope with climate change.

The UK growing season now sees regular extreme variations. Typically, we now see very wet mild winter and spring periods, followed by very dry hot summers.

Whilst our farm, which is based on the Chichester plains, has always been quite dry during the summer months, these more arid conditions have tended to arrive earlier and last longer over the last decade. Rainfall – when it comes – is also arriving in larger and in shorter periods of time.

Organic farming and climate change

As a mixed farm with grassland and cereal crops in rotation we’ve historically been quite well protected, spreading our cropping plans across both autumn and spring planting schedules. Being organic also means our cropping rotations are already well balanced, ensuring we protect and maintain good soil health.

Adapting to climate change

Despite our efforts there are a number of areas in which we’ve had to adapt, to respond to these shifting weather patterns and climate change. Here are some of the key areas that we’ve been focusing on:

  • Increasing land areas dedicated to biodiversity– 9% of our land is now in a 5-year mid-tier stewardship scheme. We’ve also signed up to additional measures to promote soil health and nature within the SFI 2024 scheme. This, along with our organic farming principals, is helping increase insect, flora and fauna across the farm.
  • Aiming to farm with no bare soil – this approach focuses on protecting the soil and ensuring that a living crop is growing all year round. After each cash crop is harvested, we replace it with a green cover crop to bridge the gap over winter until the next spring crop is sown. By keeping a living root system in the soil, the soil biology and ecosystem benefits helping to keep vital nutrients fixed in the plant root system as well as minimising soil erosion. Given the extreme amounts of heavy rainfall which we’ve seen over the last few years this has really helped to protect the soils on our farm, especially from extreme temperature fluctuations.
  • Boosting organic matter – an additional benefit of growing cover crops has been the increasing organic matter in our soils. As part of our drive to be carbon neutral one of our key objectives is to increase carbon in our soils. When we turn the cover crop into the soil to plant the next cash crop we add the biomass back into the soil to breakdown. This helps to increase organic matter, and year on year is helping to lock up more carbon into the soil.
  • Introducing dual cropping plans – dual cropping might mean that we plant clover seed within a crop of wheat. This has two benefits; the clover plant, being a legume, will fix nitrogen in the soil which the wheat plant can then use. It also keeps the soil protected from the warmer summer temperatures.

On our grass pastures we’re also adapting the drier summer climate in three ways:

  1. When planting our new grass leys, we’re adding chicory into the white clover seed mix. This plant is more drought resistant. The deep rooting system will find moisture during the dryer parts of the year and provide grazing cover for the cows.
  2. On part of the farmland we manage, we’re fortunate to be able to access water for irrigation. Over the last two years we’ve been investing in both irrigation equipment and storage to allow us to water key grazing paddocks.
  3. We’ve invested in machinery that can apply liquid waste from our cows that are housed during the winter months. By installing additional winter storage, we can apply the liquid bi-product from the cows to the growing crops and grass leys during the spring and summer months. This helps to both add nutrient and moisture to crops.

Ongoing challenges

Whilst we’re working hard to adapt to climate change, we’re experiencing some real challenges. Often the window of opportunity to prepare for planting and harvesting is much shorter. And in the spring, there is more of a need to let the ground dry out, after large amounts of rainfall, so that we can start planting. Once the soil starts to dry out, the longer dry spells mean conditions can quickly become too dry. Spreading our crop plans between autumn and spring has helped to spread this risk to a degree, but in reality, a shorter planting window means we have to work more efficiently and quicker without increasing costs!

Embracing solar power

These drier conditions and our location on the south coast has also created opportunities. Solar power is one example where we’re using our location to our own advantage. As a result, we’re investing in a number of rooftop and on ground solar installations, with an aim to rely solely on green energy as part of our carbon neutral journey.

Climate change is here to stay, and it’s critical that we acknowledge its impact and take steps to adapt. We remain alert about the work we have to do, and how we can evolve our operations to protect the future of this very special space which we look after.

When is organic truly organic

Posted on April 17, 2024 by - Woodhorn Group

As an organic farm we’re sometimes asked about the reasons we converted, and whether choosing organic products really matters to the public. John Pitts, our owner, shares his thoughts on when and why organic matters.

Why choose organic?

It’s a reasonable question for every shopper and also for me as an organic farmer of 24 years. Without the ability to manipulate nature with the routine use of pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, growth hormones and antibiotics, organic farming is a much more challenging way to produce food. I’m no Luddite; I recognise farming as a science, but I just choose not to make it a chemistry experiment.

Conventional farming has become increasingly intensive as a result of the continuous drive to deliver cheaper and cheaper food. Soils are exhausted, pollution of groundwater and rivers is prevalent, animal welfare takes a back seat to ‘efficiency’ and the global loss of biodiversity is alarming.

Organic farmers rely on natural methods such as composting, crop rotation, and biological pest control to maintain soil structure and fertility and manage pests crop diseases. Genetically modified crops (GMOs) are banned. The World Health Organisation (WHO) cite resistance to antibiotics as one of the top global public health and development threats. As a member of Organic Herd (the farmer-owned cooperative of organic dairy farmers) we are prohibited from using antibiotics and our focus is subsequently on prevention rather than cure. We believe that if we care for our cows in the right way they will not need antibiotics.

Greenwashing and Regenerative Farming

Thankfully, concern for our environment, the impact of climate change and how our food is produced is no longer a niche topic of conversation amongst a few ‘organic weirdos’ but has become mainstream. There is no longer a business, industry or lobby group that fails to make, often ludicrous, claims to be ‘green’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘climate-friendly.’ Greenwashing is rife. Sadly, the agricultural industry is no different. Marketing gurus produce eco-friendly sounding names to repackage what remains the same conventional farming but with a few media sound bite-friendly tweaks.

‘Regenerative Farming’ is such a name undoubtedly filled with promise and the apparent Damascus moment causing regen farmers to consider soil health must be welcomed. But there is no restriction on the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, antibiotics, GMOs and chemical seed dressings. Indeed, Regenerative Farming is totally dependent on the regular and continuous use of the chemical Glyphosate which in 2015 was declared as “Probably Carcinogenic” by the WHO and is banned or restricted in 25 countries including Germany. The global agrochemical industry is estimated (2024) to be worth $253 billion. So there’s no guessing who is controlling the narrative.

A recent article in Farmers Weekly hailed a 1750-cow dairy herd that never saw a blade of grass as an example of Regenerative Farming. There are no enforceable standards governing ‘regenerative’, ‘wild farming’, ‘rewilding’ or any other of the media-friendly names – except for one: organic.

My book of ‘Organic Standards’ is about two inches thick, and its contents are enshrined in law. Independent organisations conduct on-farm inspections and if I break the rules I can not only have my certification removed but I can end up with a criminal record. Consequently, you can trust that organic does what it says on the tin.

Why organic matters

But what about the outcomes? Peer-reviewed evidence around the benefits of organic compared to conventional farming systems demonstrates that. Organically farmed soils are 25% more effective at storing carbon and can mitigate both flooding and drought by storing up to 100% more water. Organic farms are 50% more abundant in wildlife with up to 34% more species including 50% more bees, butterflies, and essential pollinators The only way to guarantee that the milk you buy is from cows that graze grass during the growing seasons is to buy organic. The outcomes are endless and the food is safe, nutritious and has been respectful to the planet in its making.

The question posed was ‘Why Organic’? At Organic Herd we have a mantra: ‘How We Farm Matters’. That’s why.

A day in the life – Cameron Lewis, Managing Director, The Woodhorn Group

Posted on March 25, 2024 by - Woodhorn Group

Meet Cameron Lewis, our Managing Director. In this meet the team blog series, you can find out more about our team, their roles and a what a typical working day looks like.

I’ve spent the majority of my career in farming and agriculture, so I’ve always woken early. I’m normally up and about by 6am, and the addition of children and family life hasn’t really changed things! Being awake early means I can get my eldest two packed and off to the school bus for 7am. I can then spend time with my youngest who, at 4, ensures breakfast involves some enjoyable conversations – she certainly helps set a positive mood for the day ahead. The final job before heading out the door is to make sure Mrs Lewis has a hot cup of coffee in her hand.  

I have the benefit of living on the farm and so it’s a very short commute for me, but also means I have lots of open space on my doorstep to walk Andy, our dog. My proximity to the office also helps me get there early so I can greet the team as they arrive and have a bit of a catch up before we all start work.

It probably goes without saying that as MD of a highly diverse business with a team of nearly 50 employees, there’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ day. I report to the owner of the business and oversee the cultural and strategic direction of The Woodhorn Group, so the demands on my time vary significantly across a year. As with any farming operation, there is some seasonality and I’m used to the flow of that, but equally, life throws curve balls and so even when I do plan my days, sometimes something comes up that requires my attention. I’ve become good at pivoting and delegating to the five members of the senior management team who report directly to me, and I’m fortunate to have effective people around me. They are primarily responsible for the day-to-day operation of our core business divisions which include the farm and dairy, waste management, certified soils and the business centre. There’s also the overall finance and HR aspects of managing a growing team within a multi-million turnover organisation.

A changing role in a changing business

My role has changed a lot over the 15 years of working with Woodhorn, mainly because the business has changed and grown so much. Through the week I aim to spend time in each department, working on any live projects and speaking to the team. I will visit all the sites and farms through the month but no longer need to do so on a daily basis, given the skill of our managers.  

From time to time there are projects that require my attention more than others. Our milk vending operation, which launched in 2023, was one of these. This was a big project for us as a business and for me personally, as it’s another aspect of our continued diversification, a key theme in our strategy. It allows us to sell our organic whole milk direct to the public and takes us closer to the consumer than any other aspect of our operations. The complexities of getting the systems and processes in place to sell a single litre of milk to a member of the public, in a business which normally ships 5,000 litres a day in a bulk tanker, was interesting! But this is what I enjoy about my role, and I like that I’m always learning.

Whilst the diversity of my role is what keeps it fresh and interesting, it can also be one of the most challenging aspects. Juggling priorities and allotting time to each of the different operations can mean I have to swap hats at speed and quickly recall information about projects, strategies and budgets. So it’s important that I know and understand each part of the business, but without being involved in everything, all of the time. I have a genuine interest in all that we do, so it can be hard to maintain the divide between strategic and operational. Again, the strength and quality of our team means I know I don’t need to be involved in every little decision.

Strategic time management

One of the practices I’ve developed to remain strategic is booking out chunks of time to look at the business as a whole, each business unit individually and also the wider market. This means going out, meeting other similar businesses, visiting suppliers, attending conferences and importantly, spending time with John, the business owner. I actively look forward to the part of the year where we start looking at the next 12 months and also those sessions where we set a slightly longer term strategic flight path for the business.

Looking back over my 15 years, many of our plans have come to fruition, but there are of course some that haven’t taken off. Like any business we’ve had challenges over the years; from economic impacts to the weather and from health emergencies (both animal and human!) to significant changes in demand. We’ve always had to pivot, and been tested, but typically, because we’ve made diversification the core of our strategy, we’ve not just survived but come through stronger. 

A moment to reflect each day

Generally, I like to ensure that I’m organised and prepared for the next working day before heading home each evening. Recognising what I’ve achieved and looking at what’s on tomorrow’s agenda is important. If I’ve finished the day in the office, then the short walk home with Andy is lovely. In fact the beauty and peace of a rural environment is one of the things I love most. The other thing I like about life at Woodhorn is the people I get to work with. We’ve got a talented group of hardworking and very skilled people and being a family run business also means there is still a personal feel to the company. John still lives on the farm; his family has been farming here since the late 19th century. Sometimes as I walk home, I’ll bump into him and we’ll have a quick, unplanned update ‘over the farm gate’. These brief catch ups, late in the day, are really valuable and give us the chance to reflect on any highlights, challenges or ideas from the day.

Arriving home I’m straight into family life, hearing about school days and clubs before we all have dinner. Because we’re rural, and as the children get older, there’s often the need for ‘Dad’s Taxi’ in the evening, and if there’s some rugby to watch, I’ll be there! But most of the time a bit of peace, a chat, or a quick walk around the farm with Mrs Lewis, the children or Andy the dog is all it takes to reset before it’s time to do it all again tomorrow!

Down on the farm – March 24

Posted on March 23, 2024 by - Blog, Down on the farm, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Group

At the time of writing it feels like there is no hope for an end to the rain. We have water lying in fields where I have never seen water before, winter sown crops have been severely damaged and some won’t recover, whilst we are unable to get near the land to sow our spring crops.

These concerns are overshadowed by the desperate need to let the cows out to grass as we are rapidly running out of our winter feed. There is plenty of grass for them but a few hours on saturated fields will create such a muddy mess that the grass will not recover for the rest of the year. In fairness, the cows aren’t aware that their larder is nearly empty and they wouldn’t leave their dry and warm cow shed anyway, even if we pushed them – and you try pushing 800Kg of obstinate cow where she doesn’t want to go!

Rainfall levels have been record breaking but we have to accept the weather is, as always, just ‘part of farming’. Our troubles are nothing compared to those of the poor souls whose homes have been flooded in the parish, sometimes with raw sewage. Our farm team have spent an enormous amount of time, effort and expense clearing and maintaining our ditch network this winter, as they do every year. This is our responsibility and of course we do not get recompensed. It is, however, intensely frustrating when our efforts are undermined by the refusal of the local authority, highways and water companies, to carry out their duties in the same way.

I wrote a while back about our net zero ambitions. The objective remains, but to my mind it needs to be much more nuanced. There is far too much ‘greenwashing’ and manipulation of numbers and messages in the name of ‘net zero’ throughout industry and even national governments. Furthermore, there is little clarity or agreement as to what should be measured, let alone how. We recently engaged an independent company to carry out a carbon audit on the farm and the results were encouraging – we are making good progress. However some of the advice as to what we should do to progress further was, to be blunt, absurd. An example: we naturally have some cows that produce less milk than others. This, according to the current metrics, makes these lower yielders less ‘efficient’ and therefore they use more resources per litre of milk produced than the higher more ‘efficient’ yielding cows. The advice? To kill the lower yielders and replace them with more ‘efficient’ higher yielding cows. If being carbon neutral means killing perfectly healthy, productive cows then ‘I’m Out’.

Our ambition has always been to produce top quality food whilst being fully aware of our responsibility to the environment from the flora and fauna on the farm, animal welfare and our role in the community, to our role in tackling climate change. Pursuing net zero in isolation appears to be contra to this and whilst it is disappointing to acknowledge, it is something we need to understand better. Our overall approach to farming maybe understood internally but we have never written it down.  Over the coming months I aim to (try) to create our own Woodhorn focused set of written policies and objectives that demonstrate and prove what we are doing (to our customers in particular) whilst helping us to learn where and how we can improve. The ambition to achieve net zero remains but we will do it our way and in a way, I hope, that has real meaning.

Down on the farm – July 23

Posted on July 24, 2023 by - Blog, Down on the farm, Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm, Woodhorn Group

Another year, another drought! Another ‘Down on the Farm’ article, another frustrating delay to our milk vending project!

The latter is down to the continued delay of the supply of our pasteurising equipment. The only manufacture of the particularly specialised kit that we need is in Ireland and they have singularly failed to meet their promised delivery schedule. I sincerely hope by the time I write my next article we will be up and running. In the meantime, please help us choose our first milkshake flavours here.

Weather extremes, a principal feature of climate change, are becoming the norm.

 This year we had the driest February on record when just 3.8mm (0.1 inches) of rain fell. Compare this to our February historical average of 60mm (2.4 ins). Conversely, we had the wettest March and April for many years with a combined total of 148mm (6 ins) compared to an average of 52mm (2.1ins) for the same period. June and July are looking exceptionally dry like last year.

We aim to complete all our spring sowing in March, but the ground was so saturated that much of this was delayed until May. This significantly reduces yield potential and some fields or part of fields never dried out enough to sow at all. The high temperatures and lack of rainfall now is restricting grass and clover growth, both for grazing and to make silage for next winter’s feed reserves.

 Farmers Weekly has just run an in depth article “Dairy Farming in a Drought” which essentially takes the experiences of dairy farmers in New Zealand and Australia where droughts are the norm. My two ‘take aways’ following a bit more personal research, were how New Zealand dairying (one of largest producing countries in the world and the biggest contributor to its economy) manages drought with huge amounts of irrigation. However, this is becoming environmentally unsustainable as natural groundwater supplies are diminishing causing rivers and lakes to dry up, with over 60% severely polluted due to the intense use of artificial nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers which ‘runs off’ the land into the waterways, where the problem is exacerbated by the lack of water to create a dilution effect.

Australia’s farmers tend not to have the same access to irrigation and so the country has a significant and growing shortage of milk and dairy products forcing it to import much of its needs.

We are, as a nation and like Australia, importing more and more food. However, this is not (yet) because of drought but because of the power of the supermarkets and a lack of government interest in a food strategy generally. Like New Zealand, our water supplies are under pressure though but more as a result of our ever increasing population than from the needs of farming. However, as droughts become more common, the demand for scarce water supplies from both farming and people will increase. However, we continue to be blessed by guaranteed and plentiful winter rainfall. If we, as country and as farmers, invest in adequate infrastructure to collect and store that winter rain, we can meet all of our needs. The cost though of such infrastructure is inevitably enormous at both national and farm level.

After last year’s drought, we made some investment to create the ability to irrigate and we will do more over time. It is an expensive and challenging direction of travel, but one I think will be essential if we are to continue to grow food for our nation. Farming Organically (and so we don’t use the polluting fertilisers and chemicals) and if we are able to store winter rainfall, we will not cause the pollution problems seen in New Zealand

Harvest is not far away now and the harvest machinery and grain stores will be getting their final checks. Calving at Reeds farm starts in mid August.  We will be starting the Organic conversion at Madame Green Farm immediately post-harvest and will be sowing a variety of legume (clover and vetch for example) based crops which will start to rebuild the soil’s fertility and organic matter during the statutory conversion period – one can only sow the first organic crop two year’s after the last chemical or artificial fertiliser was applied, which means it will be nearly three years before we will harvest our first Organic crop.

John Pitts

The Belgravia Dairy Company

Posted on July 7, 2023 by - Blog, Down on the farm, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm, Woodhorn Group

John Pitts is the 4th generation of the Pitts family to farm at Woodhorn. In this article about our company’s history, John provides more background on Fred Pitts, his Great Grandfather, who moved to the area in 1882 to begin farming the Chichester plains. A farmer and a businessman, Fred Pitts was also the Managing Director of the Belgravia Dairy Company. Here John explains more about life on the farm back in those very early days.

The Pitts family were once long established dairy famers in south Devon. In the late 1800s, farming in England was in dire straits due to a flood of cheap imports from throughout the British Empire. Many farms were abandoned, land values declined and the big landowners could not find tenants for their farms. So it was for one of the country’s biggest landlords, The Church of England, who had many vacant farms in Sussex where the soil quality was considerably better than that down in Devon.

My Great Grandfather, Fred Pitts, saw an opportunity and put his cows, horses, carts, ploughs, wife and children on a train and headed east in 1882. The Church gratefully offered him tenancies on Broyle farm outside Chichester (now a housing estate), Houghton Farm near Amberley and Woodhorn Farm in Oving. I am now the 4th generation of the Pitts family to farm at Woodhorn.

In 1889 Fred move his family to ‘Sunnyside’ in Chichester and his eldest son, William, moved in to Woodhorn. Sunnyside was a rather beautiful Georgian townhouse situated next to the equally imposing Chichester Police Station. Both were demolished in the 1960s to make way for the existing Chichester bus station.

Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon’s Mines) tells of a visit to West Broyle Farm in his 1901 book ‘Rural England of 1901’. The farm was ‘mainly dairy with 90 pure and cross bred Guernseys’ and the staff consisted of ’15 men, 2 boys and 3 milkmen along with 12 horses’. He also described how Fred was ‘a good horseman and rode regularly around the 3 farms upon a high and strong horse inspecting with a critical eye and a strong arm’.

 Fred was a businessman as well as a farmer (a relatively rare combination in the 1800s) and was owner and Managing Director of The Belgravia Dairy Company in West Kensington with 26 branches in the West End, including 7 in the Mall. When my Father celebrated the centenary of the move from Devon to Sussex in 1982 , the Chichester Observer ran the story. My Father subsequently received a letter from an aged gentleman who had read the piece and described how his first job ‘as a very young boy’ was helping out on one of the horse and cart milk floats around London.

The Belgravia Dairy Company was sold after Fred’s death in 1924 to United Dairies (later to become Unigate and Dairy Crest). Nearly 100 years later we will be selling milk from Woodhorn Farm direct to the public, but this time via our vending machine in Oving rather than on the streets of London!

Down on the farm – March 2023

Posted on March 6, 2023 by - Blog, Down on the farm, Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm, Woodhorn Group

Woodhorn Group owner and custodian of Woodhorn Farm, John Pitts, shares his regular thoughts from down on the farm.

As I write this (March 6th) it feels like we are in yet another strange spell of weather and 2023 has, thus far, been exceptionally dry. This is not a problem from a farming perspective (except for that niggling feeling that when it does finally rain it will probably not stop for two months and be monsoon like!) but on the composting sites the green waste is very light because it is so lacking in moisture. This means that lorries delivering green waste are underweight because the volume is the same even though the weight is not. This is something we expect in August but not in February!

There is that lovely, positive feeling that spring is on its way, but it remains cold and the grass is not growing. This is becoming a concern as we are desperate to turn the cows out to grass (we are running out of our winter feed stocks due to last year’s drought) but the grass is not yet there for them. On the plus side, we are able to take advantage of the dry weather to crack on with the sowing of spring wheat and barley.

I am delighted to say that we are now on course to launch our vending project this Summer. Our milk will be pasteurised (but not homogenised) in our new plant at the dairy and then available in our vending machine which will be inside ‘The Oving Cow Shed’ outside Oving Jubilee Hall. Aside from making local, fresh, organic milk available, we are seeking to help everyone reduce packaging. So you can come along with your own jug or buy your own glass bottle which you can re-use hundreds of times.

Cheese and butter from our own organic cooperative will also be available, along with organic eggs from Rookery farm near Felpham. Flavoured milk shakes will also feature and there will be separate coffee machine using roasted beans from Edgecumbes in Ford. We harvested our first ever crop of organic oats last year of a variety especially suited to making oat ‘milk’. We are therefore hoping (we are still in ‘development stage’ so it’s an aspiration rather than a guarantee) to offer our home grown organic oat milk too. So, all being well, we will have something for everyone!

The Jubilee Hall will benefit financially from a % of every single purchase.

This is a very exciting project for us and something of a leap in the dark! If you would like to keep in touch with developments and anything and everything that is going on ‘Down on the Farm,’ then please visit our new website www.woodhornfarm.co.uk where you will also find links to our new social media platforms.

One aspect of an Organic farm is that the whole farm becomes a sort of nature reserve. We, of course, plant hedges and trees, sow pollen mixtures for bees and areas that will provide winter seeds for birds and create long grass and wildflower margins around fields. However, the fact that we do not use pesticides means that every field and crop is a conservation area. Weeds (wildflowers in the wrong place!) flourish due to the lack of herbicides and provide a natural habitat for all life. Insects from bees and ladybirds, to aphids and lacewings, are safe from insecticides providing food for those above them in the food chain. By not using chemicals such as glyphosate and artificial fossil fuel based fertilisers our soils are full of worms and the micro organisms that sustain all life.

Birds are significant beneficiaries of this farming system. It was some years ago that we last had a bird survey carried out (then by the RSPB) and then a remarkable ten bird species on the red endangered list were recorded. I would like to monitor bird numbers more regularly and so I wondered whether there might be two or three twitchers in the local community that might like to volunteer and get involved. The only requirement is a comprehensive knowledge of birds and a desire to spend time walking around the farm. Please email me at info@woodhorngroup.co.uk if interested. Thank you.

The vending project has already meant us taking on new skills and ideas, including the need to have a brand and logo for our milk! This is our new logo which will be on our glass bottles – I hope you like it!

John Pitts

Down on the farm – December 2022

Posted on December 24, 2022 by - Blog, Down on the farm, Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Group

I am asked one question more than any other by my non farming friends these days, and its nothing to do with climate change, Brexit or why I think sheep are pretty but fundamentally stupid. The question it seems on everyone’s lips is “what do I think of Clarkson’s farm”?

I loved it and can’t wait for the second series to start! I’m no petrol head so Top Gear largely passed me by and thus I was never one of Jeremy Clarkson’s acolytes – until now and JC has become universally popular with farmers for many reasons. First, we could laugh at his mistakes and pretend that we never did anything hopeless enough that would have incurred the wrath of a Kaleb equivalent. One of my classics was in the field, now a gravel pit, alongside Drayton House, when I was 16. The night club Martines had just opened, and they had installed a smart new wire fence around the perimeter of the grounds. I was cultivating the field and, being 16, I was far more interested in Radio 1 than what was happening in the field. I came to an end of a ‘run’, lifted the cultivator up, turned the tractor around, dropped the cultivator back in the field, and carried on my merry way. It was only when I was the other end of the field, some 400 metres later, that I bothered to look around and realised that I had hooked the brand new fence with my cultivator and dragged about 100 metres of it up the field. I’m not sure I got paid that week!

As farmers we can also identify with all of JC’s trials and tribulations, but also the passion for the job that gradually takes him over, despite those trials and tribulations, or even maybe because of them.

But I tip my hat to JC primarily because he has brought farming alive to so many people and has done so with humour whilst showing farming ‘warts and all’. Everyone, farming or not, will now know not to buy a tractor too big for their barn (though everyone now also thinks that all farmers have Lamborghini tractors. I have genuinely never seen one on any farm, ever, and if we had that sort of cash to blow on a new tractor then, here at Woodhorn, Sam and Ben would never forgive me if I didn’t buy a John Deere).

JC’s TV series has, perhaps inadvertently, led to a public conversation about every aspect of farming from conservation, soil health and how cows and sheep can jump the highest fences if the mood takes them, to the power of the supermarkets, national food security and why every farm needs a Gerald and a Kaleb. I genuinely overheard a conversation in a cafe about Clarkson’s farm when someone stated that they never understood how much the weather affected farmers until they saw this series. Given how that’s how most of us farmers bore anyone who is listening to death, this was surprising to hear!

You may see some activity along the east side of Colworth lane soon, as we carry out the next phase of our hedge and tree planting plans. Over years we have literally planted thousands of trees and miles of hedgerows. This latest phase will add another mile of hedgerow.

A friend asked me how do we make money from hedges? We don’t of course and it is an expensive hobby which is why we do this in phases. However, it is part of our commitment to the flora and fauna on the farm and is one small but important part of our carbon net zero strategy.

Planting hedges illustrates the irony (some might say lunacy) of how the politics of national food policy has ebbed and flowed over so many years. During WW2 my grandfather (William Pitts) was, like all farmers at the time, visited by the War Agricultural Executive Committee (which came to be known as the ‘War Ags’). The members of the War Ags included civil servants, local farmers and members of the Women’s Institute and had the power to take farms away from farmers who were considered to be farming inefficiently. Grandfather would have been ordered to remove hedges due to the desperate need to increase food production as the whole population faced war time rationing. Food shortages continued into the 1950s and 1960s and farmers were then paid by the government to remove hedges. In the 1970s, after we joined the EEC, policy designed to increase food self-sufficiency was too successful and we ended up with a surplus (grain mountains etc). Over the last 30 years we have, rightly in my opinion, become more aware of the need to protect the environment as part of a sustainable food policy. Planting hedges is back in vogue! But Covid, Ukraine and the fragility of a free trade globalised word, has also made everyone aware of the need to produce more at home of the basics we need to live, especially energy and food. It feels like something of a full circle, and I hope in our small way we can find the right balance at Woodhorn.

As I write, we are approaching Christmas. Our cows are lovely, gentle, and highly educated, but are completely faithless and so do not recognise Christmas. This is a shame given they live in a cow shed, have a manger, and are looked after by three wise men (well two wise men and a wise lady to be precise). The secular stance of the herd means that Graham, Tracy and Tim have to work pretty much as normal through the Christmas and New Year period, which is ‘part of the job’ but a tough call nevertheless.

We all celebrated the first frosts this year in December – about two months late by my reckoning. Frosts are one of nature’s tools that we are reliant upon to kill off bugs and flies that can challenge the cows and see off the aphids that spread a very damaging virus in our autumn sown crops of wheat and oats. Conventional farmers can spray with an insecticide to kill aphids but being Organic, we rely entirely on frosts.

We are now on course (though a year behind schedule) to launch our milk vending project outside Oving Jubilee Hall in 2023. All being well, that will be the subject of my next ‘down on the farm’ article.

By the time you read this Christmas will be a memory, so may I wish everyone a peaceful 2023

John Pitts