We offer bespoke contract farming agreements, that can be tailored to your own farm. Our philosophy is that a contract farm agreement has to work for everyone involved and must to be built on trust and understanding.
We are proud to say that in nearly 30 years of being involved in contract farming, we have never lost a farm. We treat each farm that we take on as if it were our own, there is no ‘our ground’ and ‘your ground.’
We start by soil sampling the fields, this is done every 5 years, equating to about 20% of the farm/yr. Once we have the results, we variable apply rates of lime to make sure the fields are getting what they need.
The P & K applications are tailored to each individual field. We apply a lot of fibrephos to cut down on the price of bagged P & K. This allows us to increase profit for our land owners by reducing input costs.
We are also trialling variable seed rates and variable rate nitrogen to see if we can pass on further savings on to our land owners, whilst also keeping yield high. As part of our land management, we fix any drains that are needing attention and clean out ditches to let the water run away more freely during a wet year.
The soil is very important to us, so as well as using FYM from our own enterprise and some straw for muck deals, we also buy in over 5000 tonnes of compost/yr. This allows us to feed the soil ready to push for yield.
We are trialling winter cover crop in an endeavour to reduce some nitrogen use in the spring and to provide some feed for over wintered sheep. We hope this will help to feed the soil and make the soil easier to work.
We run a mainly plough based system, with some min till. We believe that you cannot beat the plough for weed control and opening the soil up to produce better yields. We min till in the oilseed rape and sow it with a companion crop of clover.
The tap root of the clover goes down and opens the soil up, allowing the oilseed rape root to follow it. The clover dies off through the winter and releases nitrogen back into the soil ready for the oilseed rape to grow in the spring.
This has enabled us to cut back nitrogen use on oilseed rape. We also min till wheat in after oilseed rape. Everything else is ploughed to maintain yields at a high level. The wheat and barley are sown with a combination power harrow drill, applying fertiliser at the same time as drilling the seed. The power harrow drill enables us to make a fine seed bed even on heavy ground.
By being part of a larger farm, we can offer our landowners very competitive prices for inputs as we are buying them in larger amount, and usually that allows us to command a better price. Also by letting us run your farm you can save on having to buy machinery, and as we are running our machinery over a larger area, we can do it cheaper than most small farms can do it themselves.