Alex Brewster – Rotmell Farm, Dunkeld

Alex Brewster Rotmell Farm Dunkeld Perthshire

Networks & Knowledge

The 13th of October saw a fairly early start and a four-hour drive down to Hexham, Northumbria to listen to 3 global giants of Agriculture, Gabe Brown, Shane New and Dr Allen Williams. They are individually located right across America from the Mississippi to North Dakota, each with a very different climate and totally unknown to each other until a few years ago.

Collectively they have formed a global Ag consultancy business called Understanding Agriculture. All three were facing the same problems in very different locations. An utter lack of profitability in their farming operation with banks looking to foreclose their business ’ s due to debt loading. A few big weather events hadn ’t helped these guys with cash crops getting wiped out just prior to harvest, a big loss for any of us to withstand, but four years in a row would be hard to handle. When your back is that far against the wall options become fairly limited and clarity of thinking is all important but when the cashflow runs out every grain so to speak has to count.

By the late 1990’ s these 3 guys were in this hole, taking off-farm jobs to add extra income, the irony was that Dr Allan Williams was a lecturer in Agriculture and the conventional wisdom that he was teaching wasn ’t helping with the economics back on his own farm. There was never a lightbulb moment but more an acceptance that the small changes weren ’t having an impact and to make major changes they needed “to change the way they saw things. ”

FARM FACTS

Farmer: Alex Brewster & wife Jane

Farm: Rotmell 2450 acres Lude Estates 6170 acres Meikle Findowie -990acres

Location: Dunkeld

Area: Rotmell rented from Atholl Estates Lude Estates contract farm Meikle Findowie hourly rate

Sheep: Rotmell

750 Blackface ewes converting using Aberfield tups then Cheviots

Lude Estates

850 Cheviot ewes 350 Cheviot cross ewes

Cattle: Rotmell

190 commercial AA cows Operates joint fattening venture with Robert Fleming,Glenluce

Lude Estates

100 Highland x White Shorthorn cattle

Poultry: Rotmell

4000 organic free range The Egg Shed, Rotmell market own eggs

Deer: Meikle Findowie

100 hd

Jane: Architect

Staff: 8 full time

Other: Run Powered Pasture an electric fencing company www.poweredpasture.co.uk

Sell beef through MacDonald Butchers, Pitlochry

Farmers like labels, there are easy, you know what and who you are dealing with. Livestock breeds or tractor colours are classic examples. Your cattle are white (Charolais) and you drive green (John Deere), OK we ’ ve got you placed! But there is a new label in town, or maybe a new network and it’ s a bit different, a bit more diverse. Where those who identify with it come from a

broad church, some academic, some ecological, most are hands on farming, some livestock, some arable, all practical and all quizzical. I suppose I’ ve found myself in this tribe, it hasn ’t been intentional to join this network but my agricultural and ecological minds have merged into what I know regard as Agri-ecology, or Regenerative Farming.

It has taken me a while to settle into this label. I don ’t regard myself as being a bit woolly or airy-fairy, in my businesses numbers matter – its all about the bottom line, every enterprise has to be profitable, if the margins are questionable the process and Key Performance Indicators get interrogated and decisions get made…fast.

Now here ’ s the thing with Agri ecology or regenerating a landscape –plants are always going to want to grow, they can ’t help it. But why and what makes then grow and how can agriculture benefit from a 12 million year-old process of evolution? The ins and outs of this were never explained to me in my formative agricultural education. In fact looking back, educationally they were a wasted 3 years. While I was getting taught how to spray crops and work out fertiliser recommendations in the late 1990’ s, Gabe Brown and Co were figuring out that you could grow arable crops and livestock without fertiliser, sprays and drenches. A gross margin to them was a mystery because they couldn ’t afford inputs so the bottom line was about net profit.

Their other learning was that Kg sold does not go hand in hand with profitability. Profitability is dependent on how many other products you ’ ve got to pay for first. To be brutally honest, the more I’ ve come to understand how the natural world works, the interlinking between livestock, pastoral plants and microbial process, how to store energy in the soil and take advantage of the nitrogen that floats about above our heads, the more environmentally and economically resilient my business has

become.

In 2016 I set off on a Nuffield Farming Scholarship determined to prove that there was a relevance to the Red Meat Industry, but more importantly to me, I was needing to find a way to increase the profitability of the farming operation. I didn ’t know what tomorrow was going to look like, what made red meat relevant or how to make the business more profitable, but I did have a gut feeling that the natural world had worked successfully for millions of years, so how did it work?

The most important aspect to a Nuffield Farming Scholarship for me was that it gave me access to a network, a collective of people where anything is possible, a room that radiates self belief, a confidence built on the back of trials and tribulation where arrogance is a down fall and where successes have been built on the back of failure and this

MACHINERY RING BENEFITS!

is the point for me. A failure is only ever a failure if you don ’t learn from it. A lesson learned is the biggest shot of self belief and confidence that you could ever get and that feeling becomes accumulative, the more failures the more lessons learned the greater the knowledge the bigger the success.

Then you ’ ve to deal with the naysayers, “I don ’t know why your bothering, that won ’t work, you ’ll fail. ” Well, it’ s better to try and maybe fail, but to also learn. What the naysayers are actually saying is that they haven ’t the confidence or the belief to give change or adaptation a go, that the peer pressure that surrounds them is too great for their lack of self-esteem to tackle and the biggest disaster it that you might actually make it work!

These are the moments when you ’ ve to find your tribe, a group of people who are on a journey where networks and knowledge allow personal growth and development. By 2025 the agricultural support system as we know it in Scotland is going to change and there is no guarantee that the status quo will remain. There are massive strains on the public purse through geopolitical events, a global pandemic and other interest groups. Currently only the top 20% of livestock business are able to make money without a subsidy, the joke is that 80% of livestock businesses think that they are in the top 20%! For many there is going to be a massive reality check and that small changes are never going to be big enough, we ’ re going to have to “ change the way we see things. ”

Regenerative Agriculture is not about changing a landscape, that can look after its-self, Regen-Ag is about changing mindsets, resetting beliefs about what is thought possible and known. It’ s a fascinating, interesting space where harmonising a farming business with environmental goals and a network of people sharing knowledge.

Hendry Ford once said “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. ”

Gabe brown and Co have shaken the shackles of debt and built profitable businesses through failure because they took time to understand the soil, now regenerate that!

Gabe Brown, Author of Dirtto Soil, Onefamily’sjourneyinto

RegenerativeAgriculture

Published by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2018, available at www.wordery.com for £12.51

Alex Brewster, links to Nuffield Report and presentation. https://www.nuffieldscholar.org/ news/new-nuffield-farming-report.