Yeah, so thank you, Rachel for that. List of jobs for me to do as a farmer, so I'm here with a slightly different er hat on today. And so we can start.
This is me as such, I am a dairy farmer's daughter in the. Top, what was it, left hand corner, was a very intensive, highly pedigree Holstein breeder, milking cows 3 times a day, about 13,000 litres. Housed most of the time they wandered out, but they probably didn't know what eating grass was really about.
But that that makes me feel quite old now. That was 15 or so years ago. Since then I have had a family, so I now have an Angus herd at the bottom, that's me with the oldest, who's now 6, a commercial flock of sheep and me with my vet hat on, I still vet 3 days a week.
Mainly specialising and focusing on a sort of young stock health being the future of the herd, both from a financial point of view being important for the farmer, but also probably in the last 5 to 7 years focusing on more of the carbon efficiency that again, rearing those young stock efficiently can bring you. And while I was bored on maternity leave during COVID lockdown. Me and my husband managed to apply for a county council farm and were selected out of the 140 applicants.
So 3 years ago now we managed to get onto Puddleditch Farm, which is a 90 acre, they wanted it to be a mixed farm just off the River Severn there in Gloucestershire. So that is what we are. Doing now, so it is their family life and as a husband and two kids there, they have to come along with us on farm safety is really important, but equally that idea of the freedom and experimentation that I think we all, there was a load of conversations in the bar, which is maybe why I'm tired along with the list of all those jobs farmers now have to do.
Maybe it's just Sean's fault. I haven't quite decided yet. So that's a bit about what I do on my non-vet days.
And then there's some crossover bits. The idea of dung beetles and Rob spoke last last year on that and the idea of biodiversity. So where you look for these things, you will find them, whether that's birds.
I'm. Getting better at bird identification, but my husband's quite keen keen bird there and passionate gardeners. So we put in a lot of fruit trees when we arrived, we put in some hedges.
They were actually quite good on the farm when we arrived. So we've changed how we are managing those. We put in a no dig market garden and we've added some beehives, so trying to bring in that biodiversity in many different ways and trying to measure it in a few different ways as well.
We've touched on soil health quite a lot, and I think the importance of actually knowing where you're starting from is important, whether that's the structure of the soils, your sort of compaction levels, let alone the whole pH and wider sort of organic. Carbon levels as well as multiple other minerals and aspects, but making sure we carry over that idea of biodiversity below the soil and also below what you can see with the fungi and everything else that's involved. So what do we do at Puddle ditch?
We went for the Anuses. I bought Anuses back 1015 years ago, and they were actually at my dad's farm, so we decided to split the herd. Because they are easy to manage, which I have to remind myself sometimes, but that's why we selected them.
Easy flushing, trying to do the grass finished pasture for life options. They're quite a good brand for direct selling, which we will bring on to later. I have shown a lot of bulls and selling breeding bulls as well.
So I think the idea of picking the right breed for your. Farmland is important, but I think we have to remember the variation within breeds. So I think a few people's idea of the extreme regenerative farmers say they don't vaccinate.
They call quite hard to pick their family lines, and it's where along that line you you start a little bit. We also have a flock of sheep trying to do this idea of enterprise stacking, making the most from grass, using the idea of the cows going ahead of the sheep to try and help with parasite control. So we ended up with, we've gone with the native more traditional Angus approach and then Millennium Blues, which is sort of the other extreme is it's one of the newest breeds of sheep and to come through it's a beltex cross.
Blue domain, but great carcass quality, really easy lambing. We have considered lambing outside, but I think I'm a bit too much of a control freak, and I don't have the sheep dogs or the skills to do that. So maybe in the future, but not quite yet.
And of course with us really still focusing on making the most of that grass, and lambing in February means about a third of our lambs have gone slaughter already. So that brings pluses from the the the maggot prevention, the wormer use. Last year I can say all our lambs finished without any parasite wormers at all.
It was a dry year, so whether that was luck, whether that was due to the grazing methods we do, we don't know, but I think it is important for us as the veterinary profession to show farmers that these things are possible, not to sort of allow that or we always do this mentality. For something a bit different, we also run a no dig market garden. This is over about 3 acres.
Anyone know much or have a no dig marker, no dig veg patch? So the idea of your cardboard lasagna, so we have cardboard and then we use eggs from the composted in 70 centimetre strips with 30 centimetre wood stick rows so we can ergonomically pick our vegetables, so no back pain, bit questionable, but that that's the the. Method we're using it is quite manpower and man hour expensive to do it, but I'm really pleased with the less weeding that it's needed and the idea that we are producing this nutrient dense food for the local.
Community. So it's interesting, we had a few discussions yesterday on the honeybee idea. I really like it just cause I like to challenge myself and learn new skills.
So we managed to get 6 hives back 3 years ago. We're now at about 8 hives over 3 sides. Yeah, I think it's a good mix with the market garden and with the herbal lays that we've put in for the cows.
They then have multiple different food resources and it is just another product we can sell from an economic point of view. And yeah, new skill for me to play with as much as anything else. So what's next?
As of Sunday, it was open Farm Sunday, we had about 500 visitors on the farm that was sold out about 2 days before, which was a bit scary thought, but we have invested in some lockers, so my husband already runs a farm shop about 6 miles from our rented farm. Whereas we've gone with a self-service, so no staff are there in the shop. You go and you sort of do an online shop on the pedestal, and put your card in a contact pay and then those lockers open, you grab what you want and then you leave.
So that is what we're doing now. If anyone wants to follow us on social, then that's where you can see what we're up to and this idea of local nutrient dense food going back into your local community and along with that. We also do quite a lot of training on farms, so whether that's me, I do some vet CPD days like this where we get to see those dung beetles and worm counts, as well as we have quite a few school visits to just get those, you know, children between about 8 and 10 years of age just reconnecting with where their food comes from.
So going back to regenerative farming, I think it has a massive variation of what it means to different people, whether that's can it really feed the world? It's a nice idea, but it's not practical. Is it really a business?
The idea of, well, we could buy it, but it's very expensive food. Should we buy less but better. So it does have a lot of different pros and cons from a perception point of view.
But when it pulls back to it, it has these 6 core principles, it was 5, but they've added what I think is one of the most important key first steps, which is all about mindset. So there are a few different approaches, they sort of twists on a theme. So whether you deem it to be holistic management, integrated management, or conservation agriculture, they're similar with a few variations.
But if we stick to the regenerative agriculture, I think this idea of mindset is key. Rachel hinted at it that, you know, farmers that are working at 1416 hour day, you know, the banks ringing them up constantly. They probably don't have the mind space to be thinking about starting these new challenges, but a lot are wanting it to happen.
So I think that is where as the vet we can support that role of just saying these things are possible. And we can discuss the next 5 points and show that actually they can apply to many farming businesses. So the idea of minimising soil disturbance, so the idea of non not ploughing or min till is the other option.
So currently we do plough to replace most crops. However, if we go for the tilling option, then it can be quicker. We have less passes on the ground, so less tractors, less compaction, less diesel needed to power those machines, so it can be quite a bit cheaper.
And one of the difficulties is everyone's thinking, well, this is going to be the answer. Every farmer should do it is how we, when we think later, the idea of rotating crops is important, how we control those weeds, even if the weed might be actually a grass within an arable crop, how we can manage that and actually is ploughing in some circumstances better than the use of glyco phosphates, and that's another discussion to have, but the idea of When it is possible to try and minimise that soil disturbance. And the ever importance of the mycorrhizal fungi.
So by ploughing or over tilling the ground over cultivating, we are exposing a lot of that carbon and we're losing that carbon sink, but also we are disrupting all the fungi that runs within the soil, and it amazes me to think that we've got 10 kilometres within just 500 grammes of healthy soil. So that's just a useful fact to throw in. So within biodiversity, we want this range of crops.
So traditionally in the UK we are a heavily ryegrass dependent system. It has great grass growth. OK.
You know, you're looking at May, you can regraze a paddock within about 16 days. Great silage. This is what we've sort of designed our livestock infrastructure to be around in the last 20 to 30 years.
However, it has really shallow roots. We're talking about 2 to 3 inches if that. So it doesn't support the soil structure, and when drought does hit, it dries up within minutes, as we've all seen, you know, we've had a very dry end of May, start of June and already there are patches that are seeing really slow ryegrass growth because the drought is starting to kick in.
The idea of moving to herbal lays, we have overseeded half the farm to this, and this is using the mid-tier stewardship. So here, the focus is to have a range of root depths, because we've got a range of plants. We also, over a third of the mixes are the legume family, so trying to fix that atmospheric nitrogen back into the soil.
And the idea of the forbes or the herbs within it, possibly having help for parasite control, but also because they're often the families of plants that have those deeper roots, they're also going to help us with that drought tolerance that we will have to consider moving on through the next decade. So there's some great pluses to herbal lays. However, the reseeding costs are really expensive and how we actually get into the.
Whether it's the grazing platform or or into the silage lays can be difficult. We've got a very limited drilling season. Are we going to spray off the previous crop that was there?
Are we going to accept that we're going to overseed and it be very patchy in appearance is the sort of farmer term when it doesn't take very well when you've invested a lot in the seeds and to not get the results you were expecting can often put a lot of farmers off this idea. Again, stretching into arable farms, I'm definitely not that the specialist in regenerative arable farming, but the idea that we were traditionally very limited to just the rape wheat barley rotation. There's a lot more trying to do under seeding and also changing those rotation lengths and bringing in different crops as well.
So. Trying to maybe not move away from the monoculture, which we might think would be the perfect ideal, but at least over a 10 year basis, get a bit more of range of crops through that soil. So on to 0.5 now is the idea of keeping it covered.
So when we've got bare soil, the nature doesn't like that. So it will either create weeds out of the seed bank to cover it. This is when we're exposed to a lot of the erosion risks.
So again, particularly in the arable sector where the crops are harvested in the August, they might not be sowed until the next February or March, all that time of having this naked soil. So the idea of a living mulch can be. And sown under it.
So this is wouldn't say becoming common, but it is becoming a lot more discussed and played with as an idea going forward. So the idea of you underplant your clover with wheat, so your fertiliser uses are a lot less. You're decreasing your drought possibilities, and if you're really going for it, you can even put the sheep through the wheat.
So we've got great protein in the. Over for them. It takes the tips off the wheat, so we will need to use less of the growth regulators late in the season.
We increase better root health and there's also if you can do it right at the right time, you get less rust through your wheat crops, so less of the parasitic fungi issues as well, so. There are definitely areas playing with it. It's interesting the use of this precision livestock term.
A lot of people would say this was quite an old fashioned option that they probably were doing back in the 50s and 60s with mixing lays, but actually relearning some of those skills into how we can get sheep or cattle back into arable rotation. So just remembering what this erosion can do when we have these naked soils. So we get the health of the soil, not holding onto that water, but equally we just get the rush washed out of that topsoil and erosion and remembering that there is a lot of facts out there we think about all this is just applying to, you know, the dust bowl of the Midwest, whereas actually we are already deemed as a degraded soil throughout the UK.
And so what can these living roots also add to us? So this is where we come to the carbon sequestration. So they can really help with these living roots being there, sucking this carbon and hold it there as a store, which Rachel's covered, but equally they will help that soil structure, keep it quite aerated, help with water holding capacity.
And we've said with some of the climate crisis we're facing, flooding is one of them. If we can get more of just the soil to hold water, that that can be a massive plus for us. The importance of the short chain of photosynthesis, which has been covered, so we can whiz through this.
So a bit on where Rachel said in that actually, if you think about these six steps, they can apply to most farming businesses, whether you are an intense 100 cow fully housed dairy herd all the way through to more of the, you know, small hobby farmer scale of what I'm running, which is, you know, 40 cows and 60 sheep. So. It's all about that mindset shift, and that might be a good thing from a publicising point of view and bad.
It is quite a surprise to some people that you can get regenerative farms still in that intensive area. But as ever, efficiency is key. So remembering as vets, we are already doing this.
This is definitely my comfort zone with the calf health, making sure they are calving on time. Making sure we are making that healthy milk a good source and creating. Not creating disease there from a suckler herd, we've got things like BVD control.
We can't forget the pigs and their different aspects to how they can affect sustainability in a in a regenerative way as well. Sheep, the importance of worms, we have just touched on that, but aware of time and I want to have loads of discussion. So some of the odd things to discuss maybe is the use of inorganic fertilisers and also the protected fats within the dairy industry, being a very inefficient energy sink within our system.
So do we actually need it, whether that is linked to the idea of less energy dense food as well, which is an interesting thought to go down. And as ever, I am a cattle vet. It seems like all we talk about is poo.
So the importance of manure and how that actually as vets, I think we need to get a lot more involved in that being a great source of nutrition for the soil, but as ever, remembering those disease risks of TB and yoni. So that is my touch just on what we do at Puddle Ditch and also what as vets we can do.