62 WOLD FARM FEB / MAR 2022 • farmers-mart . co . uk
block of fattening cattle that haven ’ t been mixed , and that are all double vaccinated with Rispoval , come from a TB4 area and are from a Zero BvD tolerance area .
“ All our female calves and later-calve males are wintered in our yards on a primarily forage based ration . We select the best 40 females as bulling heifers and the rest will go to grass for three months before coming in to be finished . They go to Dunbia at 18-20 months .
Paul operates a closed herd with bulls being the only stock bought in .
“ One of the other reasons I like the Stabilisers is the Beef Improvement Group that is responsible for them knows where every animal has been and that each and every one has been fully tested .
Paul has also switched the way he grows his crops in more recent years . He switched to a no till regime in 2017 for two reasons .
“ I had been listening to all of the discussion over soil quality and no till . I ’ d seen how North and South America had taken it on board but with our maritime climate I hadn ’ t thought it fitted right for us . Tony
Reynolds , who farms in Lincolnshire was my mentor over going this way and it was he who helped me make the decision to go no till .
“ Brexit was the other reason . I pretty much knew that governmental monies would be going into the environmental area rather than spread to every farm in the form of a payment to all in future . And I also knew we wouldn ’ t be able to really capture any of the environmental monies , so I had to reduce my cost of production and as a tenant farmer machinery is a big one .
Paul grows around 500 acres of mainly cereals with winter wheat making up roughly half of the acreage . He grows first wheats as seed for Openfield and Grainco
and this year he is growing the varieties Champion , Graham , Dawsum and Extase . He grows a little for feed also .
Winter barley is back in the mix as Paul finds it helps in putting rape in a little earlier , which can cut down on flea beetle problems . He feeds some of his barley to the cattle and finds the straw useful . Oilseed rape , spring beans and grass leys are all part of the arable rotation .
“ We haven ’ t ploughed anything since 2017 . I ’ m a ploughman by instinct and I genuinely love ploughing but we were starting to work deeper and deeper without any benefit and if it rained after you had cultivated the soils slumped and set like concrete .
“ Don ’ t get me wrong . No till is certainly not for the fainthearted and it is not pretty but I genuinely subscribe to the theory that once you ’ ve stopped ploughing , unless you ’ ve got yourself in a catastrophic mess , you should just keep it that way , because once you touch it with a plough again you ’ ve lost what you gained .
“ We have changed our yield expectations from chasing 12 tonnes per hectare to 10 , but we are also saving on costs .
Paul says he is learning and understanding more now about soil than he had at college decades ago .
“ Our land types vary from medium chalk Wold land with clay in it to a sand-based loam at Nafferton which is not sandy but a strong medium type . It ’ s beautiful soil . We go up to 270 feet above sea level , which is not too high , and we are on reasonably forgiving land here at Wold Farm . Just off the Wolds it is a little more challenging but our soil types are largely very good , which helps .
“ My education was very much around physics and chemistry , not biology , but now I ’ m learning about biology in a way that is very real because it concerns our farm and soil types and I ’ m finding it exciting .
“ There is a book called Ploughman ’ s Folly that was produced in the 1940s and quite why we didn ’ t touch on it at college I don ’ t know because it is all about understanding micro-organisms , fungi and bacteria , the things we hadn ’ t understood but probably could have done to have known .
Paul served in various high office positions in the National Farmers Union for a number of years and was chair of the Cereals & Oilseeds committee for AHDB until March 2021 . He has just become a director of the Global Farming Network . “ I was lucky enough to be asked to be a part of this and was subsequently asked to become a director . It ’ s a brilliant organisation that reaches over 60 countries from smallholders in Africa and India to ranches in North and South America sharing information .
Paul is married to Liz Falkingham who worked with him while he was with the National Farmers Union and was previously editor of a farming newspaper . Liz operates a livery stables business from the farm .