FEATURE
FEATURED FARMER PHILIP BRADSHAW
I farm in partnership with my wife Jayne, in the Cambridgeshire Fens near Peterborough. We started farming together in 1989 when I left the family farm having gained our first tenancy on an 33ha County Council Farm. It is staggering to think that we equipped the farm for less than £10000, including a 15-yearold combine for £1500, but with both of us also doing some off farm work we had a couple of happy years there. Over the years we have moved farm twice to gain larger tenancies, inherited my father’s share of the family farm, and bought a bit more land along the way. Our 2 sons have good careers outside of agriculture, but they will still occasionally roll their sleeves up and help at harvest. We now farm 220 ha of mainly skirt fen land in 3 blocks around Peterborough, 30% owned and 70% rented. Because of the distance between the blocks, the smaller two parcels to the north are ran with a collaborator/contractor doing much of the work, with some direct drilling, while our main farm at Whittlesey is worked by myself with a fleet of largely ‘classic’ machinery on a ‘Conservation Ag’ basis.
Having gained confidence in the process, we decided to acquire our own no till drill, and considered the options of buying second hand or new. Unfortunately, with a modest acreage, and the shortage of second hand no till drills on the market it was a challenge to find such a machine. Happily, help was at hand, and we were fortunate to gain funding from the Fens LEADER group project which was part of the Rural Development Programme (RDPE). LEADER had various aims and objectives, including modernising and improving sustainability, and encouraging strategies to protect soils, and reduce Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. On this basis I decided to try an application for LEADER funding. The bureaucracy involved was daunting, but after a very comprehensive application procedure we were eventually awarded a grant of over £13500 which we used to acquire a new British built Weaving GD 3m disc coulter direct drill which arrived in July 2016.
We share farmed extra land for a while, and grew potatoes and sugar beet for many years, but dropped potatoes around 10 years ago. At this point we largely stopped ploughing and started on a system of shallow tillage using a Vaderstad Carrier, with subsoiling as required. I didn’t realise at the time, but this was a good way of preparing our soils for the move to no tillage. The system worked well, and we managed to keep blackgrass at a modest level on most of the land, while also growing consistently good yields of cereals and sugar beet. We started investigating ‘Direct Drilling’ some years ago, visiting a few people already not tilling and we also tried a few drills. One of my collaborative colleagues bought a Weaving Big Disc drill, and from around 2014 we started establishing some crops with it, and our sugar beet and OSR using a Sly Strip Cat system.
I believe we were possibly the first LEADER funded drill in the country, and we had to sign up for some interesting projected outcomes including cost savings, fuel savings, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and sharing knowledge. The new drill arrived just in time for our annual farm open day in 2016, and the 50 or so visiting farmers here primarily to look at KWS wheat varieties could also look at the shiny new drill and discuss our planned strategy. This started the ‘No-Till in the Fens’ project of knowledge transfer that was a condition of our grant. I knew then that I would have liked two drills, one tine, and one disc, but could only afford one, and plumped for disc. I believe the GD was a good choice but regret not going for a larger trailed one. We bought a second-hand front tyre press to go on the front linkage to consolidate our sometimes fluffy lighter soils, and also counter the weight of the mounted drill. We had identified with our earlier no till experience, that the headlands and some sidelands of fields were slightly compacted due to turning of machinery, so we also bought a 40 year old Howard Paraplow for £600 to cheaply alleviate headland issues.
8 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
ISSUE 17 | APRIL 2022
