Farmer Focus: Rewilding, beavers and nut trees
John Pawsey © Phil Weedon They say: “A dry May and a dripping June makes the farmer whistle a merry tune”.
There has been much merry whistling at Shimpling since all winter crops have been inter-row hoed.
Next year’s leys and winter covers have also been undersown, which leaves just our spring barley crops to be weeded.
See also: Farmer Focus: Don’t treat symptoms, look at cause of problem
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Looking back through my photos, I realise that alongside farming, we’ve been involved in several extracurricular activities this month.
Our good friends at White’s Oats invited our organic arable oat growers to their factory in Tandragee, Northern Ireland, to see our crops being turned into an array of delicious products.
A cereal that competes well with weeds, oats are a very important crop to us organically, so a strong relationship with White’s is vital to our business.
We also visited three pioneering farms at very different stages of a journey that has moved them away from purely producing food.
The first was RSPB’s Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire, where we saw regenerative, nature-friendly farming in action.
These are words often bandied about, but Hope Farm is where you can see what it looks like. It is always impressive.
Next to Spains Hall in Essex, where most of the farm’s combinable crop land has been sown with nut trees in an agroforestry alley cropping system.
Being in an area that breeds houses, they’re also sellers of biodiversity net gain.
They have beavers too. Beavers and nuts? There’s a joke in there somewhere.
Lastly, we returned to the “OG” of rewilding, Knepp in West Sussex.
When we last visited, you could still make out the hedged field boundaries, but now only the field-edge oaks reveal the old structure.
Food, nature and people are in abundance here. I’m always blown away by it.
Meanwhile, at home, we’re all incredibly busy producing food for very little return. Food for thought?
