Defra Farming Podcast

How to profit from soil health on mixed, arable and upland livestock farms - Neil Pickard, Stuart Johnson, Kyle Richardville

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In episode 17 of the Defra Farming podcast, host Neil Pickard—a farming adviser with more than 45 years’ experience in livestock and mixed farming—speaks with Soil Farmer of the Year 2023, Stuart Johnson, and Understanding Ag farming adviser, Kyle Richardville.

Stuart, a tenant farmer in Northumberland, explains how he has shifted his family’s mixed sheep and cattle farm away from conventional high-input practices towards a system focused on soil health. Kyle brings the scientific perspective, drawing on his research into soil microbial populations and his work supporting farmers across the US and UK.

Together, they discuss how improving soil health can help reduce reliance on expensive inputs, build resilience, and improve business efficiency. The conversation covers practical steps for mixed and arable farms as well as the specific challenges of all-grassland systems in both upland and lowland situations.

🔗 Useful links mentioned in this episode:


00:04
Neil Pickard (guest host):
Welcome to the Defra Farming podcast. I'm Neil Pickard, a farming advisor with more than 45 years’ experience, initially for ADAS (Independent Environmental and Agricultural Advice) and then for the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) as a knowledge transfer manager on beef and lamb, and then more recently, Yorkshire Water. I have worked in Cumbria, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire and Yorkshire. I was brought up on a dairy farm in Wensleydale where I now live.

Today we're going to explore how improving soil health can make a farm business more profitable. We'll cover mixed and arable farms, but we also need to discuss the all-grassland farm in both upland and lowland situations, as this can be more challenging.

Joining me today are Stuart Johnson, Soil Farmer of the year in 2023, who will share his practical experience. And Kyle Richardville from Understanding AG who will provide the scientific context. Stuart and Kyle, welcome to the podcast.

Kyle Richardville (guest):
Hi, Neil.

Stuart Johnson (guest):
Hi, there. Thanks for having us.

01:05
Neil:
Stuart, can you just introduce your farm type and location.

Stuart:
Yeah. So my name is Stuart Johnson. I'm in Northumberland. We are a family farm, tenant farmers. So, obviously paying the rent every year is a really important part of the business for us. We are mixed farming, generally, livestock orientated. I’m much more heavily into the livestock than I am sitting in the tractor, and we have sheep and cattle, used to have a lot more sheep, but we've kind of been shifting the balance a little bit over the last few years towards more cattle.

01:40
Neil:
And Kyle, briefly explain how you support farmers improving soil health.

Kyle:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. So my role is to come to the farm, listen to the farmer first and foremost, and understand their farming system. And so, me, personally, I bring quite a bit of the scientific perspective. So I did graduate research with soil microbial populations. They're very important. And so how can we farm in such a way that balances the ecology of the farmland with the economics of the farm business? We've observed that when you improve the ecosystem processes, the soil function, you get more efficient as a farm business and more resilient.

02:19
Neil:
And Stuart, what inspired you then to focus on soil health?

Stuart:
We come from a fairly conventional background, I guess. We used a lot of fertilisers, a lot of tillage, a lot of reseeding sprays. You know, the usual stuff, didn't really have a huge problem along the way. But someone suggested to me, I don't know why you bother ploughing the land when you're putting your arable crops in and you've got some sandy gravel down the bottom here, you could probably just drill straight into it. So to me that was just saving a lot of money. So I thought, I'll start exploring that. And looking into that, we started doing low input tillage, got away relatively successfully at times, and not so successfully at others, and then moved more into trying to do low input applications as well, you know, reducing fertilisers, sprays, various different amendments that we trialled and tested over a few years. Some had success and some of them were huge failures.

So we started probably around 2012, about 2017, somewhere around there, we'd been doing it for a few years, and it was getting frustrating that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, and we didn't know why and it set us on this path of trying to understand why on a very, very, very basic correlation, we realised when we had higher organic matters we could get away with reduced inputs. So it suddenly opened up why that was and how that worked, and then trying to understand soil, trying to get as much education as we could from anywhere, everyone.

I just wanted to try and see if we could be more resilient/better off financially. I'm a number cruncher, so I crunched numbers and realised that if we went for a slightly lower yield and maintain that soil stability and fertility a little bit, find the sweetest spot in terms of the margins. It all boiled down to finances. And obviously there's certain other aspects like work-life balance and stuff like that that came into it. I used to work an awful lot of hours and I thought, well, if there's an easier way of doing it, that would be nice to explore as well.

04:08
Neil:
So what was the first change? Was it going to direct drilling?

Stuart:
Yeah, it was purely on the arable side. We started strip-tilling to begin with and then reducing those inputs, like I talked about before, we went to a full no till, stripped back loads of inputs and loads of fertilisers, loads of chemical applications and time spent on it, trying to find that sweet spot between yield and margin.

Neil:
And Kyle, can you explain simply why soil health is crucial for productivity?

Kyle:
That's almost one of those questions that's so important and so broad it's hard to answer. The basic answer is that soil is the foundation of everything, really. If we don't have a functioning soil, we don't have functioning productivity on the farm. And so we're going to have to bring in external expensive products like fertiliser or chemicals of any sort. That's going to cost money, and we're making up for those ecosystem inefficiencies in essence.

04:57
Neil:
And one of the key things is to have variability in the species that are growing in the soil and so on. A grassland farm, traditional ryegrass, maybe with a bit of white clover in, isn't seen as a diverse lay, hence the reason many have moved to herbal leys.

Kyle:
Yeah, diversity is absolutely crucial for improving soil health and for improving really anything. You know, we talk about our gut microbiome. We want rich and diverse abundance in there of microbes to keep you strong and healthy. And it's the same in soil. So what we're finding actually is soil health is so determined by soil structure. And so I often say, if there's one villain in agriculture it's soil compaction. And so then you have to think, how does soil structure properly? How do we reverse soil compaction? And the reverse of that is what we call soil aggregation.

So soil compaction, you can kind of think of as either a brick, you know, it's very solid, it's tough, nothing's going in and out really, or flour, where everything's just so powdery. There's no big pore space. So the question is how do we aggregate the soil? And what we're finding is it's actually living roots, and different species, and different families of plants [that] provide different benefits in that soil-feeding process. Think of our grasses. They're very fibrous. They have roots that create like a mesh netting in the soil. So they're physically bringing soil together. But then you have your deeper tap-rooted herbs that are also feeding the soil. The more diversity you get of plant species, the more diversity of functions you get.

And so what we find over time is they don't compete with each other as much as we think. Actually, they work together in many ways, and we become more efficient in feeding that soil, compacting it. You know, if we’d begun these processes 10 years ago, built up organic matter levels, we could have held more moisture for longer that we could have used in this dry year. So that's just a small example.

06:46
Neil:
Thank you. And Stuart, how many years have you been growing herbal leys for?  And what's been the experience?

Stuart:
So we started about 2017. We entered the silage ground into Countryside Stewardship. We went from white clover and ryegrass mixes to these multi-species diverse leys that we were very unsure of at the time. If I'm honest with you, it was a bit of a leap of faith, and we thought, we'll give it a try and see what this does. And then we've had fantastic success with it. By the time we'd finished that 5-year Stewardship, we actually had 220 acres in the ground, when we'd only started off with 90 acres in the ground.

We’ve adjusted our livestock grazing system now, electric fencing, daily moves, bouncing things around a lot, just seen a huge amount of benefits, whether it's from livestock performance, all the way through. 

Neil:
You’ve still got some in that you put in in 2017?

Stuart:
I just took the last one out two days ago, put it back to barley. It'd been in since then. Eight years we've gone with that one. We find that the herbal leys not only last a lot longer, but they seem to last as long as we want them to.

07:41
Neil:
Thank you, Stuart. Let’s move on to soil monitoring and assessment. How do we know whether the soil is healthy? And what measurements should we be taking on a regular basis?

Kyle:
What a good question. I'd say, number one, first and foremost, let's use what we have at our disposal, and that's free and cheap. And that's a spade. You know, the best thing you can do is dig in the soil. Do you have compact soil? Do you have good aggregation? You know, when it rains, do you have puddling or is the water actually infiltrating? So those observations, you know, the smell, the aroma of soil can tell you so much about the health and which microbes are functioning. So number one, that's what we try to get farmers to do. And when we go on the farm, that is what we do. We go out in the fields and we dig and we actually look and observe the soil with our five senses.

So, number two, we can take lab tests. You know, there are your conventional chemistry tests and those can be useful. But nowadays, we actually have soil biological testing to see which microbes are there. Is there a diversity of them? Again, speaking about diversity and the benefits of that, and seeing how active they are.

And then lastly, especially in an arable situation, sap and tissue tests. So, in-season, plant-leaf testing that can really improve the efficiency of in-season fertility management.

So that's just a brief overview. But again, we should really emphasise that you can get the majority of the information that you need just from that spade sample and doing a couple other free tests on your land yourself.

Neil:
And counting your worms.

Kyle:
That's right.

09:12
Neil:
Have you, on your land, Stuart, done testing of biological activity?

Stuart:
Yes. I think there's a lot of merit to taking some soil samples and seeing where you're at, but monitoring is more important. I’m a much bigger fan of sticking a spade in the ground because you can almost read what's going on just by doing that. For me, in a predominantly grassland scenario, experience tells me that if there's a problem, probably the first thing that it needs is a good rest to try and let some roots get down there and build those aggregates.

Neil:
Presumably in the traditional farming, you had some compaction. Did you do any sward-lifting or sub-soiling, or did you try and take that compaction out?

Stuart:
I utilised a sward-lifter for a couple of years to mixed results. It's very expensive to run if you don't change your management system that led to it being compacted in the first place, when it invariably wants to revert back to that. So I used a few mechanical interventions, but the main thing was changing the system, and that was that sort of longer rest periods, not set stocking, not leaving livestock, chewing things really down tight all the time. That sort of intervention played a much higher role than going in with the mechanical intervention. I think changing the system is way more important than using one sort of tool to fix it.

10:24
Neil:
And Kyle, is there a particular soil type that it's more difficult to get the good structure in? Is a sandy soil, for example, more difficult than a clay soil?

Kyle:
Yeah, that middle of the pyramid. That's where you want to be. And we've been on some farms where you just stick that spade in and gravity sinks it in and it, you know, and then, the other ones I was on yesterday, it's almost 100% clay it feels like. So, the way I think about it is, a heavy clay soil is like a big cruise liner, right? It has a lot of power, a lot of momentum, and it takes a lot of energy to turn around. But when you do, you can really get some high productivity out of it.

Whereas that sandy soil is more like a speedboat. It can make changes rather quickly, but your ceiling of productivity tends to be capped. So it's the speed of change that's different. But yeah, that clay soil, it's hard in the first three to five years. But once you start to build and accrue those compounding positive effects, you can really get some highly productive soil out of them.

11:22
Neil:
Thank you. Let's move on to managing the grassland within this rotation, and particularly the stocking of it. I know, Stuart, that you've already mentioned that you've moved on to rotational grazing. I'm a big rotational grazing fan. Dairy farmers have tended to use a 21-day grazing rotation for the last 30 years, and one of the benefits is that in the first ten days after taking the livestock out, you get 30% of the growth, and in the next ten days you get 70%. And I think people can reduce their nitrogen fertiliser and get the same level of production by moving to the rotation. And I think that's what you were indicating earlier, Stuart, that you'd seen.

Stuart:
As soon as you start moving livestock, you have an awful lot more grass. There's some fields in ours that haven't even been grazed this year because we're just letting the grass grow and rest, which then benefits us long term as it sort of sets itself in. The roots go deeper, and hopefully we'll build a fungal network down there that helps us.

Neil:
Yeah, because one of the principles that you put over, Kyle, I think, is that you shouldn't maintain 21-day cycles. You should vary it throughout the year.

Kyle:
The fact of the matter is, every plant has a different strategy and they thrive in different conditions. So essentially in a set stock, high fertiliser situation, you have one condition, right? And one species. Or maybe two. The white clover thrives in that. So if you want to maintain that diversity in the herbal ley and not have these weedy species, which are actually opportunists, so they like the soil when it's compact and water's not cycling properly, so likewise, if we want to keep that diversity of plants, we have to manage that piece of land adaptively, in a diversity of ways.

So that can mean maybe hitting it hard at the right time of the year. That can mean long rests. That can mean a year of skipping it. So the key point is, land doesn't like a prescription. It doesn't like to be treated the same way every time. And if you do, then you're going to get the same plant that just thrives in that one condition.

13:18
Neil:
Okay, Stuart. So you haven't grazed some of your fields as yet this year. Does that mean that overall your stocking rates have fallen compared to when you were using 100 kilograms per hectare of nitrogen, for example?

Stuart:
No, I think if you're high input, you'll probably be able to carry the same level of stock without inputs when we start moving and adapting our management. And then, similarly, if you're a very low input when you start moving around, if we can fire those soils up, building those aggregates and carrying capacity, you can actually increase. There's a win on either side there.

You know, people say to me, well, you could carry a lot more stock. And we could, but now we’ve started turning it out straight after calving in March. A lot of our cows only came in, like a four, six, eight-week period for calving, and then straight back out. So on a financial level, we're not carting silage around, just moving them day to day. And then, when they're in the sheds, it’s costing us about £2.70 a day in variables. So every day that we keep that cow out that day longer, it's a £2-plus saving per cow, per head. And then, when you have 200 cows out, a marginal enterprise can actually become quite a profitable one when you’ve got the right setup to it.

Neil:
I can see the benefits of shorter winter periods inside for the cattle, but unfortunately in the west, where we maybe get 60, 70 inches of rain a year, or on the heavier soils, that's not always feasible, is it?

Stuart:
Yeah, but there's people I know who were doing it on a 70, 80-inch rainfall in the hills of the Lakes. So that's maybe one of those things that, oh, well, it might work there, but it probably wouldn't work here. And most places I've been has a huge spectrum of people doing it. And they're huge, different contexts, and everyone's getting wins out of it one way or another.

I had a similar chat with a guy not far from me who farmed his cattle in a very wet area, very heavy clays, and I said, when do you bring in your cows? And he said, usually, the end of September and bring them back out again in May. And I said, well, maybe a win for you is keeping them out till December. So everyone's got a different win, building those aggregates in the soil. We can see it happening everywhere.

15:11
Neil:
Farmers tend to run out of grass in winter because it doesn't grow very much when the temperatures cool down. Do you send any of your sheep away in winter or do you keep them all on the farm?

Stuart:
We actually bring the sheep back in winter. In the last few years we've had my uncle's spot, so we used to summer a lot of sheep there, and then we'd bring them back home, just because we have more herbal leys, which are better at carrying that nutritional value through the winter. In the last few years we've had 600-800 yows. We are very happy carrying sheep through the winter because it suits our system. I certainly don't think we're sending them off or destocking, or anything like that. Almost the opposite, to be honest.

Neil:
Have you stopped using fertiliser completely, or is there still a case for putting an early spring application on?

Stuart:
In the old days, we would use somewhere between 70 and 90 tonnes of fertiliser a year and don't use that at all now, fertiliser on any grassland. We still use some nitrogen. I'm an advocate of, a little bit goes a long way, especially with an arable crop. So currently we use less than 10 tonnes a year now and it just goes on arable. We used to use about 140 units. I'm sorry, I'm old school. I use acres and units. So I used to use 140 units an acre on the arable, and we're down to about 50 units an acre on arable now.

16:20
Neil:
What was your main driver for stopping putting the poultry manure on? Is that to help soil health? And was that harmful, do you believe?

Stuart:
Initially, I was putting a lot of fertiliser down and really just replaced the fertiliser with another input. Chicken manure is really high in bacteria, volatile as well. It can be leaching away. We got to the stage where I didn't know if we needed it anymore, and I thought, I'll just try without it. And yeah, the grass probably doesn't grow quite as green, as lush, but we're still getting plenty of grass.

Neil:
Have you changed your anthelmintic usage in order to help soil health at all?

Stuart:
Yeah, it was probably not due to the soil health when we first started. It was more like we just didn't need to worm them as much. We used to worm cattle routinely [in] spring and autumn, and then the calves come in now. And it's more for fluke treatment, really, just in case there's any fluke about. And they don't get anything apart from one treatment.

Sheep-wise, if we're on a herbal-ley rotation, on long rotation, say, past 50-60 days, we don't tend to have a worm burden, so we don't really worm much at all. Usually if we're on a system where we're rotating around, we don't tend to have a huge issue with that, especially if we get onto those longer rotations. Before a short rotation, we can create worm burden by going back round. So a 21-day rotation tends to keep that worm burden going. But after 50 days you've broken that cycle a bit.

17:36
Neil:
So how many days do you feel that you need round the rotation to break the cycle?

Stuart:
There's about 21 days the worm lives in the soil and the grass, so I always worked on 50 days plus is a good cycle. But I also work on the fact that we're not going down to the wick with it. The worm usually works in that bottom four inches, so you don't want to go too much into the stem. We want to keep them on the leaf. If we take them from high grasses down to low grasses, we're still not hopefully down into that short stuff where the worm burden might be.

Neil:
Are you still at six and seven centimetres when you're taking them out?

Stuart:
We try and go in when it's high, you know. You get a lot of trample, so it gets trampled down. So that's just feeding the soils.

18:15
Neil:
So a lot of farmers will think they're wasting that grass if they're trampling it down and they're leaving a third. So presumably when you're turning them in, you're trying to probably utilise two thirds of the grass, are you?

Stuart:
I always tend to work on just trying to take 50% of the biomass. Sometimes we take it far lower, sometimes we get far higher. It depends on the timescale, if I'm busy or not, depends if I've got a weekend with the kids. So I just leave it where it is and accept that I've taken it lower than I might like, but that's okay. It's just to fit in with what's going on, really.

Neil:
But the frequency of moving them is such that you never leave them in the same field more than two or three days.

Stuart:
Three days is my limit. Someone said to me years ago, well, if it's in really good growing conditions, you might see that plants start to come back after the fourth day. So I was like, if that plant uses up its energy reserves to come again, and then I graze it when I've used its energy and then taken it off again, so then by the time it gets more energy to grow again, it's more like 17, 18 days, is what I was told. So three days is my limit on most breaks and ideally, with the cows, twice daily if it's really wet and I don't want to make a mess. I was talking before about wintering the cows out till February, we don't have to reseed anything. We're not trying to feed stuff out. We just move them. But there's some days when I might go and move them two or three times, those really wet winters, if it's really, really wet.

19:33
Neil:
And do you tend to outwinter them on the field that you're going to reseed next year in case they make damage?

Stuart:
No, no. We used to do cover crops and then reseed them all in the spring. But now it's just on deferred grass. And we've been two or three years now where we haven't reseeded anything. And I think we've gone through the two wettest winters we've ever experienced in that time as well. Animals being on the land is not the problem. I think it's when we hold them on the same bit of land is the problem. You know, if we can just keep them moving, they don't tend to make a huge amount of mess.

When we first started out, it was on the sandier, gravel land at the bottom, but we tend to do it up on the rough ground now, just because that's better suited to fibrous roots, tussocky plants, that sort of stuff. It's much better suited up there. It's why I wish we had a big hill. I need a big hill. That's what I need. And that would save my bacon even more.

Neil:
And Kyle, to you, what's the key principles of rotational grazing? What principles would you recommend most farmers would follow?

Kyle:
Yeah, that's a really good question. And something I was thinking about while Stu was explaining his system is that's another benefit of diversity there. So you talked about anthelmintics. If you just have ryegrass and clover, you're not getting the chicories, the sainfoins, the birdsfoot trefoil that have natural anthelmintics in them. And not to mention, you know, when we're talking, when we have a lot of plant diversity, it's not just one uniform height. You have some plants that are reaching maturity. You have some plants that are lower growing, earlier in the maturity stage. So, those are just other benefits of diversity.

But I would just say, think about what Stu said. It's the rooting mass. It's the soil aggregation. It's not the above ground plant material that holds cattle up in the winter. It's the below-ground roots. So if we think about how roots get built, you know, think about a plant. The top green bit, the leafy bit is the solar panel collection. And that's what creates the food and the energy to build the rooting system. So if you're constantly keeping your plants, you know, a couple centimeters high, you know, that's like a field that has two solar panels in it versus the neighbouring [one] that has a hundred solar panels in it. How many more houses can the hundred solar panels heat in the winter than the two solar panels?

So really think about leaving a bit more solar panels on the land and then move them on. You're not wasting it, especially when you're arming that soil. You're trampling it, and you can feed that soil, you know, feed the fire that's happening in the soil that is going to cycle more nutrients for you.

21:50
Neil:
You mentioned the sainfoin and the birdsfoot trefoil, but I was under the impression that they grew better on the drier areas in the south, but you could establish them in Northumberland, Stuart?

Stuart:
Birdsfoot trefoil is an easy one, but Sainfoin, I've just introduced it two years ago. I used to think you couldn't do it, much like what you just said there, Neil. I'm still a work in progress with that and I will keep you updated on how that goes.

Neil:
How much do you push red clover? Because red clover can make the grass grow because it captures all that nitrogen. It only lasts probably three to four years. That's one of the disadvantages in an all-grass system. And some people say it can affect fertility in sheep at tupping time. Do you take a conscious decision not to put in too much red clover because you've got sheep?

Stuart:
I used to put in 45% red clover into the herbal leys, and 45% ryegrass to try and tick the box to say, I've done a herbal lay and then try and get as much production out of it as possible. But then the more you go into mature grass grazing and diversity and extending grazing seasons, those are two species that are really not suited to that. So I've actually pulled the legume content of the entire mix back to about 15% now. And of that, 15%, about a third of it, is red clover. And the rest of it's sainfoins and birdsfoot trefoil, white clovers and stuff like that. So I didn't pull it back for sheep. I think when you've got diversity, and my vet attests to this, that if you've got diversity there, the red clover is not a problem. And we still have plenty of red clover in there. We still tup on red clover.

I have not, I’m certainly not sitting here saying that people want to take my word as gospel, you know. Do your research and check it for yourself. But we don't tend to have a huge issue with that. As long as you've got enough diversity in there to keep that balanced diet.

Initially, like I say, I wanted it all. Red clover, productive plants, but ryegrass and white clover peaks really early, you know. June, you've had your good growth, unless you put something else on. With a herbal ley, you'll never see that sort of high level of growth, but you'll get a lower level but for a much more prolonged period as one species comes up and then another one comes down, you know. They constantly rotate around.

And then in terms of the three years of red clovers. We still had red clovers after eight years in that herbal ley that we just took out. If you let them reseed and go to a full head, they'll just keep going. No bother at all. It's that management style of it. So, I always let everything go to a full reseeded head in the first 18 months.

And just, when I do make a mess of a grazing with it, which you do, you know you can’t get it right all of the time, but when I do make a mess of it, there's a whole host of seeds down there that's from that herbal ley that will hopefully come back, rather than the thistles and the nettles and the docks that will want to come back as well. We tend to just keep them going as long as we can really.

24:25
Neil:
Okay, let's just move on to cover cropping because, for the mixed farm, keeping something growing in the ground for 51 weeks of the year is a positive thing. So Kyle, just tell me why that's important.

Kyle:
It all comes back to soil health, soil being the key for farm productivity, particularly on the arable side. So, there are the six principles of soil health. So there's minimising disturbance. There's keeping living roots in the soil, as you mentioned, pumping that energy into the soil. There's keeping the soil armoured. So you're protecting against erosion, especially, you know, in those wet winter months, if you have any kind of slope and you get some of the winter rains we've had recently, your topsoil is just gone. It's down to the bottom and it's going into the waterway.

So as much as we can capture energy, pump it into the soil and feed those fungi, feed those soil aggregate-building creatures, you're only going to set yourself up for success. You know, there are challenges obviously. We want that nice armour to keep weeds from growing. But then, you know, you always create another problem, slugs being a common one. If you want nutrient cycling, if you want to build a soil that can handle water better, you need living plants in there. When you have bare soil, there's a soil scientist in the US, and he says bare soil is naked, hungry, thirsty, running a fever. And so no soil improves when there aren't living plants in there. And cover crops are just a great way to have short-term living roots in there, in an arable system.

25:48
Neil:
And Stuart, then after your arable crops, you put some cover crops in. What cover crops do you tend to put in?

Stuart:
We used to spend a lot of time, so like you say, as soon as the arable crop came off, we put cover crops in and then we use it for outwintering. Initially, I was all brassicas, that were stock proof, you know, really good for feeding stock. And the more I kind of come to understand a bit more about soil, and certain plants are really good at stimulating soil health, and some are sort of just there for the ride a little bit, shall we say. So, I try to incorporate a lot more with mixes in those cover crops now, you know, trying to cover all the species there with a legume, a grass, some sort of herb and then a brassica. So I try and sort of tick all those boxes when I'm doing them.

I have pulled out of cover crops a lot recently. So I've moved my whole arable rotation to a more five and two, I call it. So it's five years’ legume and herb-rich swards, followed by two years of arable. I used to grow wheat and then barley, but it complicates things. So I actually just grow barley now completely. We put barley in straight after a herbal ley and then we put another barley in if there's time. And I put a cover crop in there between the two barleys, but invariably up north, we don't get the time for that.

So I’ll just put another barley in and then I'll put it straight back to legume and herb-rich sward, which sort of allows us to grow like incredibly low input arable crops where we're just sort of put it in the ground. It might get a few compost teas or some sort of cheap amendments going on, but we very rarely put a lot on. So we're not punting for four, five tonne an acre, we can get a really good margin, it's sort of, two and a half, three-tonne an acre. So it's just that balance, and that mindset is that actually we get a lot more profit or resilience without aiming for a lot more yield.

27:26
Neil:
And do you undersow the barley when you're coming back to grass, because barley is taken off fairly early, sufficiently early to put your herbal leys in then after that.

Stuart:
Yeah, so the barley goes in, and then put the herbal ley in, and we might put some muck on if there's a bit of muck lying around, and then we'll just put it straight in and then we actually spray it with glyphosate. But we do it at a reavlly reduced rate. If you can drop the pH down of the water itself and then put some fulvic acid in, you can use a lot less of the actual Roundup product.

And then we tend to find that it kills off a lot of the grasses and takes out most of the herbs, but doesn't tend to take out the clovers. So they continue and ride along at the bottom of the barley a lot of the time. Usually we have a bit of an understory of clovers going on in the bottom. You reassess what a mess is, I guess, in the field, if there's some red clover or white clovers in the bottom, and it looks slightly less tidy than a barley crop that we would have grown in the old days. But that's okay, because they're actually doing some good and helping feed stuff, and it kind of works on both fronts.

28:23
Neil:
Okay. Kyle, what advice would you give to farmers starting on this journey, particularly the all-grass farm?

Kyle:
Yeah, find farmers in your local area who are doing similar things. I really think peer to peer, farmer to farmer learning is the gold standard and you can't get any better than that. You know, people in your area doing it, they're going to have the best advice for you. I'd say number two is keep learning. There are so many online resources now, whether it's adaptive grazing, there’s a free one on YouTube. It's just, try it.

Neil:
We have a lot of upland pastures that have not had fertiliser on for the last 50 years, really. So they are already diverse swards, not much ryegrass in them, not much production in them. Probably only doing five tonnes of dry matter per hectare, per year. How do we start with those farms and try to introduce something that will double that yield?

Kyle:
So, Stu, do you want to talk about the Marsdens, the episode we did with them?

29:17
Stuart:
We run this podcast, Grounded. It's a bit of a nice little hobby that we have on the side. They're hill farmers. They have a very similar scenario where it's ground that has very little inputs, all that sort of stuff. And it's about waking that soil up, is what we're trying to do. A lot of the soil gets tired and probably has a level of compaction and stuff like that. So there's always something underlying. And generally you go in and you dig your holes and you see what you see.

And ultimately generally it comes back to, let's rest this, and then and then you would hit it with a really high stocking density that allows a huge amount of biology from those ruminants, animals, sheep, whatever it might be, that then lays down biology in that area and then rest it again. And generally we can wake the soil back up, which then, in turn, creates more growth, creates more harmony between the soil and the plant that then generates a lot more growth. Once you get that ship turned round and it starts to function a bit better, it just generally creates a huge amount more productivity.

30:07
Neil:
So is the number one thing for most of these people to move to some form of rotational grazing and make sure the rotational grazing has different rest periods?

Stuart:
I would say that's a great starting point. Any movement is better than nothing. Absolutely, 100%. The more you experiment, the more you'll find what suits you and your context, but also the more you'll want to experiment. For me, when I started, I was like, I'm not moving cattle more than a week. I just can’t. I'm not moving sheep any more times than once a week. I haven't got time.

And then you suddenly think, oh gosh, I've got a lot more grass there. I wonder what would happen if I moved them every four days, and then you suddenly have way more grass again, and then you think, well, what about three days, two days, one day, and then all of a sudden, before you know it, you've convinced yourself that you need to move the cattle every day because you've got more grass than you know what to do with. And that comes from just starting small and then building into it.

30:53
Neil:
Thank you Stuart. And so from what you've learned in the last ten years, what are you going to do in the next five years? What are you going to do differently to what you're doing today?

Kyle:
Good question.

Stuart:
[Laughs] I think for me, I would like to get rid of the arable. We still have a system whereby we feed a few head of cattle out. We utilise the arable still, we still need the straw. And for me, I would like to get rid of the arable full stop. It’s a family business, so I'm not going to say that's necessarily going to happen for 100%. You know, everyone's got to be happy with what's going on.

But for me, I'd like to build a system that didn't really need arable. We didn't need to feed any. We didn't need the straw because we kept everything out year round and we leaned more into genetics that are able to manage that forage-based diet a lot better, and which we have done already, but we're just kind of continually moving. It's a very slow, slow thing, especially changing cattle. You can't do that in a year or two.

31:40
Neil:
So you said you've moved breeds then. So what breeds were you on and what have you moved to?

Stuart:
Oh right. Well, I'm going to risk offending a lot of people when I tell you this, but with the sheep, we used to be on mules, and I wanted to be fully mules. You know, 15 years ago, I wanted all mules yows. They’re a fantastic sheep if you're using inputs. But as soon as you strip out, say, feed in the winter. So we haven't fed anything to the sheep for three years now. Like nothing.

And on herbal leys, we don't take supplementary feed out anymore. And we found that the mules were getting too lean. So we’ve phased out the mules now and we're using generally Abertex Innovis-bred sheep. And then with the cattle we used to be all dairy-bred, either Limousin or Belgian Blues. Again, they don't stay fit when you leave them outside on taller, ranker grass. So we've moved to a stabiliser-type cow which is a little bit stockier, but also has a bit more self-carrying capacity.

32:30
Neil:
Okay. You say you haven't fed any concentrates to the ewes for the last two or three years. When do you lamb? Have you still got plenty of grass to lamb down in late March early April?

Stuart:
We used to lamb in February-March in the good old days, but we used to have to run everything through the shed and that's really time consuming and expensive. So we've moved lambing to April now. We lamb, kind of the… maybe the last week of March, first week of April. But then we tend to find that if we shut the grasses up in the back end, we have a bit of grass in the spring.

So again, in the good old days, we used to make an effort to make sure we chewed everything down to the wick through the winter, so we didn't get any winterkill or anything like that. I don't remember the last time we saw winterkill the wetter winters we have these days, so we just tend to let everything grow away through the winter quietly. In the spring, when the weather does come good, when we've got a four-inch leaf rather than a one-inch leaf, that growth is a lot faster.

33:23
Neil:
And Stuart, you’ve been doing this for a number of years. What have you learnt during this process?

Stuart:
It's okay to make mistakes. We make mistakes so much on the farm. I know I've talked a lot about the benefits today and stuff that's gone really well, and there's an awful lot of that that comes from it. But also there's an awful lot of mistakes happen along the way, loads of times that we’ve had to really dig in and make sure that we get things right. And there's an awful lot of planning and prep goes into things to make sure that happens.

I think the important thing is that it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to get things wrong. It's all about experimenting. There's loads of challenges going on. You've just got to try and ride through them and don't dwell on those mistakes. Just keep them as learning experiences and push on to the next thing, you know. Someone said to me a while back, if you're going to fail, let's fail really quick. Don't hang on and try and force something to work if it's not going to.

Kyle:
You know, to make a profit in farming now, it's not easy. It's very hard, given the climate, both from the weather side, from [the] economic side, it's hard to make a profit in farming now, so really be open to new things. Like Stu said, if you're not winning, you're not losing, but you're learning. You're either winning or you're learning. So we need to adapt and be willing to try new things.

34:29
Neil:
And when do you feel that more than 50% of UK farmers will be moving into regenerative farming?

Kyle:
Well, I can start. What is the definition of regenerative agriculture and at what point do you become a regen farmer? I tend to have a pretty low bar. I think as long as you're improving the soil, if you're improving the water cycling on the farm, for example, you're a regenerative farmer because you're regenerating those ecological processes.

You know, like Stu said, you don't have to be perfect. There is no finish line. As long as you're improving, I think that's the main point. And so, every farmer and every farm business should be willing to think about ways that they can improve. So hopefully if we really nail down this perception of regen ag and not make it seem like an ‘us versus them’. It's all of us, and we're all just trying to improve and use more of the ecological freebies that we talked about.

35:19
Neil:
What proportion of the farmers round you, Stuart, do you feel is starting to move in this direction?

Stuart:
There's definitely more movement into herbal leys. People start with a herbal ley and it beds in and moves on from there so I'm hopeful that when people have had them for a little bit, it'll really galvanise them to want to understand a bit more. Kyle said, don't let perfect get in the way of great. People think, oh, you have to do everything 100% perfect. Just do something and try and improve, like Kyle says, and that's really important.

35:44
Neil:
Thanks Stuart and Kyle for sharing your insights and your practical experience. I think we've had a good discussion today that will help the all-grassland farmer and those that are considering making the move towards regenerative farming. We've heard about soil health practices, grazing rotations, cover cropping. By tracking the results and experimenting and learning from each other, farmers can see real business benefits.

As our discussions have shown today, improving soil health can boost productivity, reduce costs and make the farm more resilient. So it's an investment that pays off on upland farms as well as on arable and mixed farms.

If you enjoyed this podcast, subscribe to the Defra Farming podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow the Defra Farming blog at defrafarming.blog.gov.uk for more insights. And thank you everyone for listening.

Stuart:
You too, Neil. Thank you.

Kyle:
Take care, thanks for having us.