The biology is attached to manure that’s coming out the back of the sheep getting all the bacteria and insect life working within the soils and that just wakes up the biology within the soil but too much will deteriorate so it’s about having them moving about native breeds used to come along, munch and move on and we want to recreate that system of come along, eat a bit, move on so no piece of ground is over munched or trod. Much of our farming system we’ve always concentrated on what’s above ground and producing the crop not improving the soil health so by welcoming livestock back in and using manures it’s actually focusing on waking the soil up to make our crops grow stronger and better in the future.
No till farming explained
Much of our farming system we’ve always concentrated on what’s above ground and producing the crop not improving the soil health so by welcoming livestock back in and using manures it’s actually focusing on waking the soil up to make our crops grow stronger and better in the future. Worms that beaver away turning the vegetation that sits on the top of the field after harvest and turning it into nutrition, munching it up, consuming it and then the larger worms that are the deep burrowing ones and they make lovely holes, drainage holes in the soil which means the rainfall percolates away really easily and quickly and it means that the conservation no-till farming style is very resilient to the weather which means the opportunities to plan when you want to plant are much greater as well as the cost savings.
The impressive thing about the root structure in these cover crops is it’s gone down in a soil that’s very friable it’s got a nice open pore structure there’s been no compaction it hasn’t run together in a period of high rainfall like some soils can and there’s been absolutely no impedance to how that plant grows this soil hasn’t been tilled and disturbed any deeper than a inch and a half two inches deep for five six years now and it proves that actually you don’t need to plow or till to create an environment for plants to root freely in.
Ultimately it’s about building resilience in our ground and feeding the soil keeping it living to be able to then grow that crop. We’ve reduced our ploughing by up to 60% and that is growing okay and still using forms of aggressive tillage for example subsoiling but instead of then ploughing the land we’re using a cover crop to break the land up only working very shallow so it’s a step change over a period of time.
