Farmer Focus Arable: Martin Lawrenson weighs up ELS options

We can always tell that winter is upon us when we get a call from our local sheep farmer looking for some overwinter grazing for some of his store lambs.

This job is usually carried out in gale-force winds with cold rain running down the back of our necks. This year was no exception. But once we had sorted out the wire and posts that were piled up in a corner after last year, the job went fairly smoothly.

When the lambs arrive they invariably charge across the field ignoring the nice lush grass and walk straight through our new fence into the ditch, or onto a field of freshly emerged wheat. After relocating them to their new home, we usually spend a few days repairing the fence in the morning after the local deer have inadvertently wandered through it during the night. Sometimes we wonder whether it’s worth it, but they bring in an extra income and the grass fields benefit from having the sheep on them.

Our original ELS agreement has finished and the renewal application pack dropped through the letterbox the other day. With the options we used last time, we should qualify, but I was interested to note that you can now use conservation of traditional farm buildings to add points. They have to have been built before 1940 and made out of traditional building materials.

Our brick barn, which is next to the farmhouse, fits the criteria as it was built early in the last century. It wasn’t the original as that burnt down in the 1920s when my granddad was a boy. The cause of the fire was always a mystery, until one day, when in his 90s, he revealed that it was his fault as he was smoking woodbines in the hay loft and it caught fire. My granny nearly fell off her chair.