A new year often heralds a time for new beginnings and this year really does bring with it one of the biggest changes to the family farming business in my time.

Several hundred acres, which we have rented on top of our owned acreage for more than thirty years, has been purchased by the Forestry Commission and it has now planted the majority of it with trees.

I even got involved in the community planting day and first picked one of the rarer species in the hope I will be able to remember the actual tree and therefore bore my family with the story for years to come as we wander around the new (well, officially new) public access areas.

About the author

Andy Barr

Andy Barr farms 320ha in mid-Kent, aiming to farm as regeneratively as possible. He stopped ploughing 25 years ago and over this time restructured the business with less land farmed and increased the use of contractors, environmental areas and diversification projects.

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This loss of land, combined with another – hopefully successful – Countryside Stewardship (CS) application that includes a fair dollop of two-year legume fallow, and rapidly reducing direct support payments, means the way we have farmed for generations is changing.

Owning all of our own machinery and employing our own labour no longer stands up to financial analysis compared with teaming up with somebody else, so that is exactly what we are going to do.

Of course, the farmer in me would not have voluntarily given up all the rented land, but it was challenging soil, and the upside is that most of my fixed costs will now be variable and I should be nimble enough to react to the changing farming landscape.

For me, that won’t include rewilding just yet, but it was great to receive a letter telling me my Countryside Stewardship payments were increasing, albeit slightly bemusing, as I don’t have a new agreement yet. Hopefully, it’s a good sign.

Mr Eustace also mentioned the CS increase in his Oxford Farming Conference speech, but to hear him suggest that growers simply need to demand better prices from supermarkets was rather more perplexing.

However, he must know what he’s talking about, so I’m simply going to demand lower nitrogen prices this year.