Category: Blog

Supporting local businesses

Posted on November 26, 2024 by - Blog

The Woodhorn Business Centre, set in the superb West Sussex countryside, supports a diverse range of businesses. We’re home to more than a dozen companies ranging from management trainers and camper van hire to fabricators and architects.

When our owner John Pitts took over Woodhorn Farm more than 25 years ago, he was keen to explore ways in which to diversify the business. With a set of farm buildings no longer required for agricultural use, the decision was made to convert them, and the business centre was born! We now have over 27,000 square feet of mixed commercial use space, including self-storage units, offices, warehousing and light industrial workshops.

Today we are very proud to be supporting a fantastic group of local companies including:

With easy access to the A27, both Chichester and Bognor Regis nearby and free parking, our commercial spaces offer a stunning rural location with views of the South Downs, plenty of beautiful outside space and our herd of Organic dairy cows often found in nearby fields.

Both of our West Sussex sites in Oving, the Woodhorn Business centre and Ham Farm, are highly sought after but to discuss future availability, please contact Kayleigh Akehurst.

Down On the Farm – November 2024

Posted on November 25, 2024 by - Blog

Reflecting on what’s happening down on the farm, John Pitts, our owner and fourth generation farmer at Woodhorn, shares some thoughts about the farm’s relationship with Organic Herd.

Organic Herd is a farmer owned co-operative of around 100 Organic dairy farmers across the UK and we at Woodhorn have been proud members for the past 25 years. Organic Herd supplies milk to the likes of Yeo Valley, Wyke Farms and Kendal Nutricare baby foods. As well as being the only 100% Organic dairy cooperative in the UK, they are also the only supplier of milk in Europe that come from farms that never use antibiotics.

A year ago Organic Herd launched an own range of speciality cheeses, butters and chocolates. None of these are available in supermarkets simply because the big chains expect to take such a big percentage of the sale price that, after production costs, there would be nothing left to go back to the farmers.

So instead these products are available through delis across the country, stores such as Planet Organic and in our vending machine at Woodhorn Farm!

All products are made by artisan producers that fit Organic Herd’s ethos (“How We Farm Matters”), are made to historical recipes, are additive free and of course are made from milk that is certified Organic and antibiotic free. Cheeses are made using traditional cultures and matured in wooden boxes, whilst butters are cream tumbled in 1960s butter barrels and then hand salted and churned in small batches.

Whilst this might seem an Organic Herd advertisement, it’s simply another part of our story and who we are at Woodhorn, supporting all the things we are trying to achieve.

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…

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.

A day in the life – Mike Jupp, Commercial Director, The Woodhorn Group

Posted on March 5, 2024 by - Blog, Woodhorn Group

Meet Mike Jupp, our Commercial 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’m normally in the office at about 7:45am and so my day tends to start early – around 6am. I’ve made a resolution to be more active as once I’m in the office I don’t get much of a chance to do any exercise. So at least once a week I’ll head to the gym for a circuit session on the way in. But most days, it’s a more gentle start; I’ll get up, make the tea, let the dogs outside and prepare their breakfast. Whilst home isn’t that far from the office, it takes about an hour to drive in so I’ll leave the house before 7am. It’s a busy part of the world and so I enjoy listening to the radio as it gives me something else to think about that’s not the traffic! It’s actually quite good to have some time to myself in the car as it gives me a chance to get my thoughts together for the day ahead and – on the way home – to mentally leave things behind or make some calls.

As the Commercial Director at Woodhorn I work closely with the teams across all of our departments. The first conversations in the morning are something I value, whether its discussing what the team got up to last night, what everyone watched on TV or what they ate for dinner. It gives us a chance to chat before the phones start ringing and the craziness of the day begins.

An industry of early starters

Across our certified soils, waste management and farming teams, we work with companies and individuals that typically start early. It’s not unusual to find a batch of emails or orders in my inbox even before I’ve left the house in the morning. Therefore, once the computer goes on, we’re hard at it, certainly for the first couple of hours of the day at least. Whilst I oversee the commercial side of things, I’ve been with the company more than a decade and so I know a lot of our customers extremely well. I like maintaining contact with them and have recently moved back to sit in the sales office because I still love the buzz. As a consequence, the short to-do list I start the day with tends to grow as I enjoy picking up the odd opportunity or deal myself.

I report to our Managing Director, Cameron, and because we’re a close-knit team, we regularly chat about various aspects of the business. Yes, there are the key times of the year such as the summer when we focus on developing new budgets for the coming financial year (which will end up being my targets!) and the winter when we look at bigger, strategic plans for growth and expansion; but we’ve developed a diverse business and so there’s always something to discuss regarding the day-to-day operations or opportunities.

A focus on soil and waste management

Whilst my background is in the horticultural sector, Cameron takes the lead on our farming activities, leaving me to manage certified soils and waste management. I work with our Materials Recycling Director, Morgan, on securing new waste contracts and have a sales team of three people who run soil sales including our retail brand Earth Cycle. Recently, however, a fair amount of my time has been dedicated to launching our milk vending operation. This takes milk from the farm and sells it direct to the public through some innovative vending machines. We opened our first location in Autumn 2023 and have big plans to expand this to other sites and sell more of our milk to restaurants and food producers locally. So having not been heavily involved in the dairy previously, it’s an area I’m getting to know well now.

I know a lot of people say that no two days are the same at work, but they’re really not here, especially because of the seasonality we encounter in each aspect of the business. For instance, our soil sales are non-stop from March to September with retail sales peaking around Easter or early summer, subject to the weather. Our green waste, however, tends to be offset to that and is busier from summer into the early winter. The farm is of course dictated by crops, harvest and calving but from a sales perspective can be quite busy over the autumn and winter as we sell our calves, crops and grains to various customers and merchants. Oh, and there’s always thousands of litres of milk to collect and sell every day too! So not only are no two days the same, what I am doing on those days will be dictated by the part of the business currently most in demand.

Establishing a B2C brand

As far as challenges go, growing the Earth Cycle brand is probably the one aspect of my job that has brought the most over the years. The majority of our work is about bulk, business to business transactions. Setting Earth Cycle up as a consumer facing brand with ecommerce and all that entails presented some interesting tests to the business model and our normal mode of operation. By and large we have overcome them and today, Earth Cycle is a highly successful part of our business and I anticipate that it will continue grow into a big enterprise of its own. I’ve enjoyed being part of that journey and helping it establish and flourish.

Having spent a lot of my previous career outside and selling, I still enjoy getting out and about. I’m based at head office but frequently visit our compost production sites in either Tangmere or Fawley. I also like to go and meet customers, do site visits, and catch up with some of our suppliers. Thankfully I’ve got a great team at the office, so I know that everything will be looked after, whilst I’m away.

Without my team I don’t think we’d have built the customer base we have. Our customers trust us as their supplier because they know the people they’re working with and they can rely on us. Working alongside these guys and being in a rural location are probably the things I love most about my job. Whilst the drive from home can be tortuous, once I arrive at work and take in the peace and quiet and the views and catch up with the team it all becomes worthwhile.   

Reviewing the day

Towards the end of each day, the team will come together to review the day’s sales, look at tomorrow and the remainder of the week and month. We analyse and track our performance against budget constantly and will share thoughts and ideas as to how we can correct the numbers or manage supply and demand to try and even out production. As noted, I start the day with a small, focused to-do list and this is the point where I prep that and look at what the following day will bring in terms of meetings, calls and visits. We end the day as a team much as we started it, having a friendly chat about any evening’s plans.

I’ll go home via the gym a couple of times a week to maintain my resolution to be more active and help break the journey and avoid the peak traffic. I also DJ occasionally so from time to time, I’m heading to go and do that. It’s busier around Christmas as I work in several venues across the festive period, but during the remainder of the year, Fridays and Saturdays are when I’m typically spinning the decks! It’s very different to the day job and I love listening to music and watching others enjoy it. As a family we have property in Spain and so my other relaxation includes holidays or long weekends there. It’s great to have a bolthole in the sun, especially during the autumn and winter; it always helps me recharge the batteries, ready for the next big push or project at work. 

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