Visit to Holkham and Houghton Halls

THE SCHOLARS VISIT HOUGHTON HALL & HOLKHAM HALL, NORFOLK

Saturday 12 March offered the Scholars an opportunity to visit two working estates in North Norfolk that had different aims and employed contrasting farming practices.

Houghton Hall was the first visit of the day with a morning of organised activities. The Houghton Estate is farmed organically. The Scholars were welcomed by Lord Cholmondeley who explained his ethos for organic farming. The Scholars were then split into two groups to visit the dairy and see the 600 milking cows, which produce a tanker of milk every two days. The tanker itself was in the yard collecting milk when the Scholars arrived on their tour of the whole estate, that was conducted in trailers towed by tractors!

The tour took the Scholars on a journey through the lanes of the estate to visit fields which showed the diversity of farming at Houghton Hall and the importance of soil care and crop rotation.

On completion of the tour, the Scholars listened to a talk by Charlie Crotty, Technical Director and Tom Rawson, Operations Manager, at Cholmondeley Farms Limited (CFL), a farming business split between the 1,533 hectares on the Houghton Estate and the 745 hectares at the Cholmondeley Estate in Cheshire. CFL’s focus is on farming cows, deer, arable, dry stock and berries where conservation is a key objective. CFL is managed by Evolution Farming Ltd, which manages 3,300 milking cows covering 4,000 hectares and employs more than 60 people on 9 dairy farms.

The next stop was Egmere, Bunker Hill, to visit the vast grain storage facility and farm centre belonging to the Holkham Estate. The estate has a total of 3,558 hectares of land that is managed by Holkham Farming Company, originally set up in 1996 to act as a contractor service for the seven in-house family farms covering 2,500 hectares of arable land. The remainder of the land is under agri-environment, game and conservation.

A tour of Holkham Hall estate followed, starting with a walk to the Holkham Monument where the Scholars listened to an interesting talk from Michael Pollitt, Professor of Business Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School about the history of farming, Lord Coke and his considerable influence on agricultural methods in Britain.

Then, in the Holkham Hall courtyard, they were greeted by Poul Hovesen, Director of Holkham Farming Company, and his senior team, including Conservation Director Jake Fiennes, who spoke to the Scholars about the estate management and specialisms at Holkham which include forestry, livestock and potatoes.

The day concluded with a drinks reception and dinner at Holkham Hall that was hosted by the Earl of Leicester.