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# Banter 142:  21Oct26 Farming in Today's Climate, with Alastair Boyd

severe impact of drought, rising costs for diesel, straw, water, difficulty of managing livestock during extreme weather, impact of water restrictions and infrastructure issues on local water supplies

{% embed url="<https://youtu.be/0pT1FPlA3Hk>" %}

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### Presentation:

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No slide presentation this week - the video is the presentation

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#### Meeting Summary:

Oct 21, 2026 11:53 AM LondonID: 834 5460 8536

### Quick recap

The meeting focused on the current challenges facing UK farming, with The discussioAlastair sharing his experience as a beef and sheep farmer in Kent. He described the severe impact of drought, rising costs for diesel, straw, and water, and the difficulty of managing livestock during extreme weather. Alastair explained his farm's operations, including the use of buildings for wintering cattle, the challenges of holiday lets, and the impact of water restrictions and infrastructure issues on local water supplies. He then covered the role of government grants, the debate over rewilding versus food production, and the need for a more stable price base for farmers. Participants also discussed soil health, the use of artificial fertilizers, and the potential for regenerative practices like under-sowing with clover. The conversation touched on the shift in consumer demand toward plant-based diets and the importance of diversification and innovation in farming. Finally, the group discussed the loss of market control to large processors and the historical role of organizations like the Milk Marketing Board.

### Next steps

Next steps were not generated due to insufficient transcript.

### Summary

#### &#x20;<br>

#### Kent Farmer's Operational Challenges

Alastair Boyd, a 79-year-old farmer, discussed his farming operations in Kent, which have expanded from 140 to 263 acres over 20 years. He described current challenges including drought conditions, high feed costs, and water restrictions affecting his beef herd and sheep operations. Alastair explained his farming practices including \*

#### Environmental and Farming Challenges

Alastair discussed environmental issues including Ashford Council's plans to build a new sewage works to handle 7,000 houses and a 29,000-tonne waste dump in local woods that has been cleared with government directive. He shared experiences about farming, including raising goats for meat and selling directly to customers, though challenges arose when the local abattoir closed. The discussion concluded with Stuart raising concerns about farmers' priorities, noting that cost increases for diesel and fertilizer are more pressing concerns for farmers than environmental or regenerative farming initiatives.

#### Agricultural Grants and Food Security

Alastair discussed challenges with government agricultural grants, noting that rewilding initiatives don't financially benefit food producers due to the cost versus reward imbalance. He expressed concerns about food security, particularly regarding reliance on just-in-time supermarket supply chains and the vulnerability to disruptions like the current conflict. Graham questioned whether traditional farming alone is sufficient for resilience, to which Alastair responded that larger investors and corporate entities have been buying agricultural land, often for tax advantages rather than production, while smaller farmers face difficulties competing with these larger operations.

#### Soil Management and Fertilization Practices

Sue asked Alastair about soil depletion in domestic gardens and how farms maintain soil quality. Alastair explained that while farms use cattle manure, they still need to supplement with artificial fertilizers due to regulations on spreading manure and the different nutrient content from dairy versus beef animals. Regarding environmental protection, Alastair described their practice of storing manure in a contained building during winter to prevent runoff, and explained the rules around spreading manure in different locations and keeping it away from waterways.

#### Water Management Infrastructure Challenges

Alastair discussed water management challenges, explaining how construction projects like the M20 motorway and Channel Tunnel have damaged natural water supplies in the area. He described how water parks remained empty for five months during a dry period and shared details about a £20,000 water collection system that helped the town survive an eight-week water shortage. Alastair attributed the water depletion to infrastructure damage from road and rail construction that cut through natural water tables and springs.

#### Gen Z Meat Consumption Concerns

Pam raised concerns about Gen Z's declining meat consumption and questioned why farmers aren't transitioning to crop production instead of livestock farming. Alastair explained that certain lands aren't suitable for arable farming and highlighted the limitations of growing crops on clay soil, noting that many fruit orchards have been replaced with smaller, more numerous trees. The discussion touched on soil types, water retention, and the economic challenges farmers face in switching to different crops.

#### Worms in Agricultural Production

Alastair and Graham discussed the use of worms in agriculture, particularly at the Garlic Farm which has seen a 20-30% increase in production through worm usage. They explored soil quality challenges and the importance of proper nutrition in farming, with Alastair advocating for a return to the Norfolk rotation system. When asked about DEFRA's strategies for food security, Alastair emphasized the need for guaranteed prices for farmers and criticized the current grant application process, suggesting that a deficiency payment system similar to the 1960s approach would be more effective.

#### Sustainable Agricultural Practices Discussion

Richard and Alastair discussed agricultural challenges and opportunities, focusing on sustainable farming practices and market dynamics. They explored topics including crop diversification, low-input livestock farming, and the potential for regenerative agriculture techniques such as under-sowing with clover and using multiple crop varieties to reduce disease and pest risk. The conversation also covered the impact of agricultural policy changes, including the privatization of marketing boards, and the challenges farmers face with large buyers controlling the market. Both speakers agreed that diversification and crop trials are important approaches for addressing current agricultural crises, though they acknowledged that soil type and other factors limit implementation options.

***

### Chat:

00:18:38 richard stow: Any experiences in the group in regenerative arable, especially undersowing with clover and benefits to weed control.

00:21:42 Andrew Clegg, Box near Bath: Alastair -What are the three (say) most important strategies that you would like to see Defra adopt to ensure that you and your colleagues can guarantee our food security as the climate begins to bite us

00:25:37 Pam Rosling: As 24.2% of the UK population either don't eat any meat or intend to go meat-free, why are livestock farmers not switching to vegetables/fruit and crops for human consumption, most of which are currently imported and therefore at risk from likely food crises!

00:29:55 Andrew Clegg, Box near Bath: The ‘today debate’ last night was on this topic. Well worth listening to

**00:30:51 Pam Rosling:** This trend is even stronger amongst younger generations: 2 in 5 from generation Z (41%) and a third of millennials (32%) intend to follow a meat-free diet in 2026.<br>

### (Source: <https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/uk-diet-trends>)

00:45:04 richard stow: Replying to "This trend is even stronger amongst younger generations: 2 in 5 from generation Z (41%) and a third of millennials (32%) intend to follow a meat-free diet in 2026.\
(Source: <https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/uk-diet-trends>)"

There's definitely lots of scope. Crop trials, farm gate sales, low risk crops, Potatoes, vegetable protein, peas/beans, Growing veg high skill, labour intensive, high returns/acre but low wholesale profit margin. Overall,

00:53:07 Sue Burton: The only pretent meat I eat is a veggie sausage !

00:53:33 richard stow: Replying to "This trend is even stronger amongst younger generations: 2 in 5 from generation Z (41%) and a third of millennials (32%) intend to follow a meat-free diet in 2026.\
(Source: <https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/uk-diet-trends>)"

Change needs to be encouraged by policy, which it is to some extent. Skills set , land suitability and markets will limit pace of change.. Forestry, biogas from grass, low input livestock can provide diversification from 100% livestock

00:55:09 Andrew Clegg, Box near Bath: My farming fiends all say - give them back control of their market

01:06:04 Clare Edwards RHE - GRCC: I have to head off but thank you for such an informative discussion!

01:13:30 Joolz Thompson: Thanks everyone - fascinating discussion. Also have to drop off now.

01:17:02 Andrew Clegg, Box near Bath: Thanks Alastair

***

#### Audio-transcript:

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: So… All yours, Alastair, if you'd like to go ahead, please.

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Alastair boyd: Thank you very much. I'm Alastair Boyd, I'm 79, been farming all my life.

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Alastair boyd: The farm that we were on originally, so I was born on.

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Alastair boyd: As farmers do, we had a nuclear war.

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Alastair boyd: And, I parted company with them in 2007.

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Alastair boyd: Been farming down here for the 20 years, unfortunately.

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Alastair boyd: It's a farm, started at 140 acres, we're now farming about 263.

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Alastair boyd: It's wheeled clay, which gets very interesting in the summertime, particularly this last summer.

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Alastair boyd: We farm, beef, herd.

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Alastair boyd: With stall cattle, which we sell in the autumn.

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Alastair boyd: We've got about 30 sheep and a ram, which we've got my granddaughter, who's very keen on farming. Not encouraged by her father, I might add.

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Alastair boyd: To, take up the job.

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Alastair boyd: We also have been growing, except this year we had none. Grow a hay for racehorses.

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Alastair boyd: And, we buy in straw for littering.

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Alastair boyd: This farm down here, we had nothing, it was a playing field.

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Alastair boyd: When we came down here.

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Alastair boyd: We've now got about 25,000 square feet of buildings that we put the cat in in the wintertime.

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Alastair boyd: We had to put up the building 40 by 50, if you would please, to put the dung in, because we're not allowed to put it out in the fields.

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Alastair boyd: That when you look over the fence, you don't see many people doing it. I don't know why we got picked on.

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Alastair boyd: But otherwise, we have, two lodges, which we built. We used to… we had,

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Alastair boyd: two, like, caravans, for, holiday lets, which we put in for the Olympic Games, because we were sure of being in Kent, close to London, we'd make a fortune, and we never let one of them.

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Alastair boyd: But in the meantime, we've, let them, but mainly on Christmas, sorry, on… Weekends.

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Alastair boyd: It's do the summer.

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Alastair boyd: a very on-off job with, Airbnb and TripAdvisor.

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Alastair boyd: But, they take a fair chunk out of it, and this ties you down to the weekends. It's a great job having to walk down through the garden with two 20-liter cans of poo to put into your sewage system, but that's life.

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Alastair boyd: As we're quite concerned about the farming job, because although I've got two grand… four grandchildren.

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Alastair boyd: Tour with a dairy farmer who had 400 cows.

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Alastair boyd: But, from his Dutch

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Alastair boyd: But he, had his brother had a massive stroke last November.

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Alastair boyd: And, they've had… been rushed off their feet, the two of them that's left, trying to make the place work.

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Alastair boyd: My daughter had an accident with a dog.

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Alastair boyd: And, damaged her spine, and she was a human and animal osteopath, and very good at it. But that's… I understand there, they won't be able to… she won't be able to work anymore, but there we are.

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Alastair boyd: We've had a hell of a summer.

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Alastair boyd: We sold 20 cattle and calves in the spring, because we could see that the drought then was having an effect.

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Alastair boyd: And the cost of forage down here is astronomical.

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Alastair boyd: We've got a huge gap in our silage lump.

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Alastair boyd: That should be fair.

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Alastair boyd: We hope that we'll be able to manage.

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Alastair boyd: But we're feeding straw and molasses

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Alastair boyd: To the cattle to keep them going during the drought.

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Alastair boyd: The calves are eating, cake as though it's going out of fashion.

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Alastair boyd: It takes about 5 kilos of cake to put on a kilo of meat on the calves.

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Alastair boyd: They will be going once the,

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Alastair boyd: Buyers come from… hopefully come from eastern counties.

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Alastair boyd: That's where they normally go. I don't know what we would do if we have to try and keep them over winter.

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Alastair boyd: We've just got a normal thing we use, a straw spreader to blow the straw into the buildings for litter.

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Alastair boyd: And it also helps, because it spreads it, and you use far less of it.

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Alastair boyd: We normally feed the, the cows with silage, and if we're tight, we use hay, rough old hay that's, like thrashed hay or something like that.

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Alastair boyd: Which, is a body filler.

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Alastair boyd: Being, beef cattle, they normally make something out of nothing.

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Alastair boyd: But these are limousines, these have come from Le Moges in France.

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Alastair boyd: They're quite big cows, although, unfortunately, as time has gone on, we've been buying very good bulls, but the better bulls are… have a better confirmation, but they get smaller.

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Alastair boyd: That's, and when you're selling the stores on weight, it's quite important you have that.

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Alastair boyd: We've got one Angus Bull, as a sweeper.

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Alastair boyd: And also use it on the heifers.

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Alastair boyd: Nangospull has a smaller head, so it's easier carved to the first carvings.

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Alastair boyd: We, put prints, which are, the pedestrian, which gets the cattle to Killing half, the calf. We put the heifers on that, so they all come bullying more or less on the same day.

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Alastair boyd: So they get served by the AI man.

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Alastair boyd: The bull we pick.

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Alastair boyd: And, if they come, they'll let them run with the ball for one other session. Other than that, they get the shot.

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Alastair boyd: We've got about 40 heifers running at the moment. We normally only have 22.

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Alastair boyd: But, so we're quite anxious to keep the numbers up. We can't have enough food to keep the cow and calf, but we've got the next generation.

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Alastair boyd: Well, what else would we say? We had no rain, really. Bits something like 1976, we had no rain from the spring bank holiday to the autumn bank holiday.

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Alastair boyd: This morning was the first time we've had a rain. We've had, sort of, what they call in Scotland Rich, so damp and wind and not doing any good.

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Alastair boyd: The grass is now surprisingly good. It's grown like the clappers. There's some ball patches where they've,

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Alastair boyd: Thing?

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Alastair boyd: I don't think the clovers come through as well as wanted. We used to mix hay, grass and clover mixes.

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Alastair boyd: And a long-term mixture, which meant grass seeds that… some that went… died out or lost their oomph in, 2 years. Some went on for 5.

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Alastair boyd: But by putting a clover in there, it's a nitrogen affixedium plant.

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Alastair boyd: And it, feeds the, the ground around it.

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Alastair boyd: Through nodules on its, on its roots. It's legume, it's, like, peas and, and, beans.

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Alastair boyd: What else is there?

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Alastair boyd: Yeah, except for costing… the cost of diesel's gone from 75 pence to 112 this week.

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Alastair boyd: The straw's gone up by a third.

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Alastair boyd: 20 pence a kilo instead of 20.

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Alastair boyd: And then I understand from my husband, my son-in-law, his milk's gone from 43 pence to 35.

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Alastair boyd: Water has gone from £2.85 per cube to £3.7 pence per cube.

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Alastair boyd: Can you imagine where you've got that number of cattle?

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Alastair boyd: They can drink throughout the house and home.

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Alastair boyd: It didn't help when the water company brought in the restrictions. They also dropped the pressure.

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Alastair boyd: Which made some of them get bit… the cuck get bit arsey about not having enough.

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Alastair boyd: We have put in 100,000 litres of water storage.

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Alastair boyd: From the buildings, we redirect all the water through into these

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Alastair boyd: They have to go through a filter system.

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Alastair boyd: The filter systems are brute for blocking up with fine rubbish or getting mold on them, which blocks holes up.

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Alastair boyd: So you have all the massive roof left size, but it, very little bits and the tanks.

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Alastair boyd: We're just a bit concerned about the two bigger lumps of muck getting into it, because they then block up the ball valves.

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Alastair boyd: In the cattle yards.

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Alastair boyd: We've looked at, dry water from a river, but the river Butte through us, it's… like this summer, it gets just pools of water that doesn't run.

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Alastair boyd: Which, incidentally, the… The Asher Council… Asher was trying to build this 7,000 houses.

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Alastair boyd: They can't put it through the current sewage works because the nitrate.

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Andrew Meikle: Excellent.

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Alastair boyd: space.

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Alastair boyd: And, so they just got planning permission to build a new

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Alastair boyd: Sewage Works, which then dumps all the crap in our river instead.

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Alastair boyd: But they haven't… they've got permission for the plant, they haven't got permission where to put it, and the Environment Agency's playing silly bees at the moment.

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Alastair boyd: keeping quiet, not main attention. I dare say we'll find out one day they've done it.

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Alastair boyd: On the incident of that, we had a…

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Alastair boyd: What was said to be a 29,000 tonne, dump of waste to put in one of the woods on our parish.

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Alastair boyd: After a long fight, our third MP managed to get the Minister, the Tory Minister, to give a directive to the Environment Agency that they would just clear it.

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Alastair boyd: And to pay for it themselves.

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Alastair boyd: That's just finished.

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Alastair boyd: And they turned… they said they had moved some nearer 40,000 tonnes because of the, spoilage and all the rest of the dirt they had to take out at the same time.

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Alastair boyd: What else is there?

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Alastair boyd: I think it's down to you to ask the questions. We've got 5 bulls, that's the other thing.

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Alastair boyd: That, yeah.

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Alastair boyd: We use live… live bulls as a service, and really use the AI to sweep up at the end if we need to, but we find the bowler… the bowler-hatted bull isn't as well-informed as the live one.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Do you expect, Andrew, the price of beef to go up accordingly, to give you back some of those extra costs you've had to put out?

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Not hearing me?

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Alastair boyd: He's just gone… Mute.

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Alastair boyd: Andrew Meikle are you talking about?

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: No, I was talking to you, sorry, I make.

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Alastair boyd: Sorry, I didn't you turn the name, sorry.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I did, I did that.

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Alastair boyd: go up? I don't know. The government's done a deal with, New Zealand… sorry, Australia and America.

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Alastair boyd: It just depends, a lot of these people, they don't want the quality.

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Alastair boyd: We sell, about 6 animals direct from the farm.

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Alastair boyd: We just got the carcass coming back for the third one this morning.

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Alastair boyd: Which goes into the butcher, and the butcher, hangs it for 31 days, and then we, he cuts it into all the bits and pieces, and, vacuum packs it.

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Alastair boyd: And we can have 300, 350 kilos of meat coming on a Thursday. On the Sunday night, there's not even enough for us to eat.

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Alastair boyd: It's quite amazing how my son's got it going quite well. It's very popular, and he does a good job, and the meat's very, very good.

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Alastair boyd: We did do some lambs, but that's, interesting job.

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Alastair boyd: It's… you've got to remember you've got to cut the darn things all the way down to the abattoir, and we're very, very, very lucky to have a abattoir within reach

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Alastair boyd: Who deals with it?

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Alastair boyd: I forgot to say, when I first started, I was looking for something

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Alastair boyd: Out of the box to try and make a bob or two.

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Alastair boyd: And, a local lady, she had gone to dinner with the Lieutenant colonel of the Gurkhas.

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Alastair boyd: And he was lamenting that he couldn't find anybody to supply goat meat for his men.

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Alastair boyd: So I thought that sounded a very good idea.

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Alastair boyd: So I start up, and I've got a couple hundred goats down here that meet in their house.

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Alastair boyd: And the only thing I had failed to do was ask the Gurkhas.

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Alastair boyd: Because they are very, very frugal.

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Alastair boyd: And they use a really rough-shell meat for every day, and they only have the sort of better meat for high days and holidays.

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Alastair boyd: And,

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Alastair boyd: So, yeah, it was interesting. The greatest demand we had was when we had to pack up. The, local abattoir of Charing 37 miles, that went broke, and then some Asian folk took it over.

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Alastair boyd: And they weren't there very long, and I presume it's been dismantled, but it would mean I'd have to go 25 miles to another abattoir, 50 mile an hour, 50 mile trip.

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Alastair boyd: And, they didn't like really being travelled that far in a trailer.

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Alastair boyd: So then, of course, you had to go 50 miles to get the… pick up the carcasses.

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Alastair boyd: And most of the people want only about 3 or 4 at a time.

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Alastair boyd: And it can make it quite an expensive job.

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Alastair boyd: But, yeah, it was… it got quite a market. It's surprising how many people come after it. It's too late.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Wow.

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Alastair boyd: Who's a bubbler.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: The grass that is now growing like crazy, is that going to save you for the winter months?

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Alastair boyd: It's grazing for the cows, yes, but quite often when you get this, it's usually in September you get this burst.

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Alastair boyd: And it quite often goes so fast, it leaves the minerals of the goodness behind.

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Alastair boyd: But, it's anything that fills them is good.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Well, rather than my continuing on with idiot questions, let's open it up to everybody else. If there's anyone with any questions, please raise your hand.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: And then, Stuart, well done.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Hello, thank you. I think you're very brave, coming and facing us lot at this stage.

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Alastair boyd: No, it's crazy. It's being silly.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Yeah, I do have some connections with farming in Kent.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: My brother-in-law was, one of the bowmen who farm near… Tonbridge.

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Alastair boyd: Alright, yes.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: I've been there for years.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: But I've just had a farmer move in next door to me.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And I've been trying to discuss regenerative, agriculture with him.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And he just really does not want to know. He's more concerned about what's happening with the,

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Sustainable Farming Initiative, what sort of grants are available, how to make ends meet.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: As you say, the cost of diesel's gone up, the cost of fertiliser's gone through the roof, all these things are of a lot more concern than the environment or regenerative farming. I was just wondering what your views on that are. I mean, it sounds to me as though farmers are having a really bad time at the moment.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: With the climate change, with,

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Extreme variations in the weather, crops failing, as you say, trying to feed your animals, trying to keep them watered.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: There are so many other things to worry about, rather than the climate itself.

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Alastair boyd: I think the government is driving you to a certain extent. We were very, very lucky that we tried to fill in the application for the SFP that's just come out.

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Alastair boyd: And we've got an agent to do it, which costs about 300 or 400 quid.

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Alastair boyd: But he tells us, and we don't know for sure yet, that he managed to get it in. But it was a matter of hours before, I don't know how many millions of pounds have been allocated. People must have sat on the computer with a go button.

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Alastair boyd: Because it went so quickly. Last year, it ran out early.

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Alastair boyd: It certainly helps, but you have to have so many loops you have to go through.

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Alastair boyd: But, rewilding… Well, I'm not too… too into… We're… we're food producers.

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Alastair boyd: So that's what our main aim is, is to produce food. If you had to pay, say, £10,000 an acre, and you're asked to rewild, and the government gives you about a couple hundred pound an acre, it doesn't stack up.

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Alastair boyd: And what is worse is that they tend to let these schemes die, so somebody that says, take it out with timber job, they suddenly find that their grants are stopped, their fields are full of trees.

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Alastair boyd: It's, you know, it's…

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Alastair boyd: governments change, their attitudes change, the ministers change, and the amount of pressure the, Greens cause on them, they tend to follow. It's very… the Minister… I don't think the Minister of Agriculture's actually been on the farm.

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Alastair boyd: Or if they have to just be somebody in their yard.

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Alastair boyd: You need somebody who really knows what they're doing.

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Alastair boyd: That not necessarily sympathy with, but works with agriculture.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Yeah, I agree.

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Alastair boyd: We're not producing… we're not producing half our food.

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Alastair boyd: I think… I'm very frightened of what will happen. I think Putin's… this job has blown up to such an extent now that we're at war now.

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Alastair boyd: And I'm just very concerned that you go to the supermarket, which is supplied by just in time, where you see the farmers, when they block the hubs, how quickly the supermarkets get in trouble.

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Alastair boyd: And they're only just a day or two. They've got no stores, there's no real, real bulk of places. And when you sell meat through the market, or cattle through the market, and they… the processors are the ones that make the money.

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Alastair boyd: It's not the producer. And the consumers, they pay whatever the supermarket wants to make up of it.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Yeah, fundamentally, I see, sort of, agriculture, food production as a major driver for climate change.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: And I really think that we have to get on top of How we use the land.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: If we are gonna, sort of, tackle the climate crisis.

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Alastair boyd: Well, we're not going to do anything to the ground that's going to deteriorate it. That's cranky.

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Alastair boyd: But if you want to have some… yeah, in the hills and places where there's, not actually…

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Alastair boyd: food produced. I know in Scotland, with the hills, they produce lamb, but with the producing in the eastern counties, if you muck about like that, I think you're asking for it. You can't eat rewilded trees.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Good point.

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Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Okay, thank you.

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Alastair boyd: Yours, Graham.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Well, I was actually listening to the…

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: variety of activities. I'm assuming that you're saying that you have to undertake these for a, a bit of resilience, and B, that just farmers on their own who are not,

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: renting out their caravans, or they're not doing something out of the ordinary, are not going to make it.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: You can't do just plain farming any longer?

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Alastair boyd: Well, we've got a company around us that any land that comes up for sale, he hooves it up.

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Alastair boyd: Please, he's made his money out of waste management.

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Alastair boyd: And you've got the licensing counties where you get, Dyson buys thousands of acres.

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Alastair boyd: They're the people who have been investing. This… the grant… the relief on agricultural land hasn't helped, as far as the smaller people, but has the big boys. The big boys bought land to avoid tax.

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Alastair boyd: And then they… if they let it out, that's fine, but it's like Clarkson, he bought this 10… was it 10,000 acres?

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Alastair boyd: Or 1,000 acre, whatever else. But he said, initially, it was for his shooting.

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Alastair boyd: But if you… if you listen to that program, that is so good, because it shows you, actually, he has had the… yeah, he's a bit of a burk sometimes, but the gist of it is about right.

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Alastair boyd: And it is scary, because…

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Alastair boyd: You… we can see that when we bought the last dollar fuel, it's going to go up by the much it has.

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Alastair boyd: And, when it was going up, we bought a second tank.

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Alastair boyd: Well, we don't want to… we filled that, but that's gone.

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Alastair boyd: And now, you can't really afford to put, these are the price it was, into a tank. Don't repeat it, but we had a big problem a few years ago with, country cousins, to help themselves to all the fuel on farms, coming across the fields with tankers and trucks.

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Alastair boyd: And nick of it.

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Alastair boyd: And I don't know if you had that, Dan, your way, but that was a problem.

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Alastair boyd: And if you tried to make the tank tooth fixed, they just drove a 2-inch pipe through the side of it, took what they wanted to, and left the harassment running down the road, but…

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Alastair boyd: It's a commodity we can't do without.

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Sue, would you like to have a go, please?

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Sue Burton: Yeah, thank you. Hello, everybody. I've got two questions. Yeah, absolutely, it sounds very, very tough.

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Sue Burton: One… we, in our domestic gardens, and anybody who follows anything to do with nature and environment, is very worried about… well, is…

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Sue Burton: On their mind that the soil is getting depleted, and what can we do in our own gardens to

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Sue Burton: try and make that soil richer, more like what it used to be. And I wondered what you do on your farm, you know, to keep the, the,

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Sue Burton: quality of the land that you're grazing, how… what you actually do. And you mentioned about you couldn't spread the muck, I don't know anything about that.

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Alastair boyd: No, the buck spreading is to restrict the time of year. If you have… you put buck on the fields in the winter, and it rains very heavily, it runs off.

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Sue Burton: Yep.

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Alastair boyd: or it runs down through the drains and pollutes. But, we… we have just finished spreading, because the restrictions came in

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Alastair boyd: last week or afterwards, we managed to… we always do it before the restrictions come in. I mean, what we…

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Alastair boyd: What we get from the, dung in the winter is put back onto the grass.

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Alastair boyd: But there's enough to cover the whole ground.

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Alastair boyd: Because you'll get certain… if you have, dairy cows, When the grass is eaten.

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Alastair boyd: The milk goes away in a lorry.

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Alastair boyd: So the slurry hasn't got the same quality as, like, beef animals.

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Alastair boyd: So that… now, when you're doing your garden, if you get muck on it, if you've sponged some muck, or… I see nowadays they're putting it in a bag, something… you've got to feed your ground, you can't keep taking, taking, taking.

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Sue Burton: Yeah.

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Alastair boyd: And if you use beans or peas or something like that, that does put nitrogen back in the ground.

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Alastair boyd: You've got phosphate and potash you've got to do as well.

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Alastair boyd: If you get one of these garden kits, it might tell you what you need.

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Alastair boyd: There's so many things for the garden center now, which it encourages you to add.

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Alastair boyd: The travel is it cost you?

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Sue Burton: Well, obviously, trying to do it naturally if we can with your composting at home, but so, your main source of tooting back the nutrients is the dung being spread at the right times of the year.

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Alastair boyd: No, it's only partial.

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Sue Burton: Partial, right?

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Alastair boyd: We still have to buy artificial fertilizer.

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Alastair boyd: The artificial fertilizer now is something like 4…

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Alastair boyd: There's a 3… where are we?

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Alastair boyd: E500, over 500 pounds a tonne. And it used to be about 70 or 80, but equally, you can get urea, which is cheaper, but, it, can evaporate with the sunshine on it.

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Alastair boyd: And, so you tend to try and go on the prills.

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Alastair boyd: If it rains, the water… they immediately break down the water and it goes to the ground. Otherwise, it just evaporates. So you're chucking money into the sky.

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Alastair boyd: It just depends on your garden. You'd have to test it and see what it's got. It may well be your low in Lyme, because lime locks up a lot of nutrients. It releases a lot of nutrients.

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Sue Burton: Hmm.

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Alastair boyd: There used to be an old saying that lime enriches the father and beggars the son. It was in the sort of 17th century, they found that lime got land growing again, so that farmers used to put on so much of it, it went to alkali, which was equally as bad as acid.

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Alastair boyd: You could grow crops like potatoes that, are acid… like acid better than they do alkali, but you know all about that.

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Sue Burton: Well, a bit. I'm not far from you, by the way, I'm in East Sussex.

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Alastair boyd: Oh dear. It was too close to home.

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Sue Burton: Yeah, exactly, now I'll come and find you.

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Sue Burton: I'm in battle in the

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Sue Burton: Then my second question was, you were talking about your dealings with the Environment Agency, and, there's a far, fisheries, actually, in East Sussex that has had, runoff

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Sue Burton: Eventually, though, it's 2 years ago, think of the name in a sec, and the runoff has come down from up a river, come onto the river, and then gone to the fishery, and in 24 hours, the whole content of their lake was killed off.

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Sue Burton: It was actually in the Guardian recently, and so I wondered how you, at the other end, because you're obviously very responsible, how you don't produce runoff that then goes to somewhere or other that then has a negative effect.

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Alastair boyd: It's called getting a £30,000 bill, a building, and putting it in it.

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Alastair boyd: Instead of it sitting out in a lamp in the field.

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Alastair boyd: You know, it's loaded into this building over the winter.

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Alastair boyd: And it's contained, this goes in there reasonably dry. There's not too much leachate from it.

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Alastair boyd: And then you take it out in the spring.

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Alastair boyd: It wasn't this time of year.

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Sue Burton: So, sorry, just to make sure I've understood, to not have runoff in the winter, when it's raining more, you putting the cattle in a shed.

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Alastair boyd: No, no, no, no, we're…

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Sue Burton: Okay.

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Alastair boyd: We're in the shed anyway, but we have to clean the sheds out several times in the winter, particularly before they start carving.

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Alastair boyd: And that dung is put into this building, which has got walls all around it, and it's a concrete floor.

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Alastair boyd: So that, then that contains it.

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Sue Burton: What do you do with it?

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Alastair boyd: Put it out in the field at a lump.

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Alastair boyd: By the rules, you can't put it out in the same place

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Alastair boyd: year on year, you have to have separate places. But you have… if you don't know what your drainage is down underneath, you stick on the top of the drainage pipes, and the leachate will go down.

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Sue Burton: Right, right. So it's very… so there's actually… no, you're doing what you're required to do to prevent it, but there's… and so it's about following the rules, and that people… some people don't.

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Alastair boyd: Well, I'm not saying what anybody else does, I can't say…

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Sue Burton: No, no, no, but…

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Alastair boyd: But there's a… when you put artificial fertilizer on, there's a limit to how close you can go to waterways.

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Sue Burton: Right.

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Alastair boyd: So that these… and you have a special disk which only puts it away from the river, not towards it.

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Sue Burton: Right.

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Alastair boyd: You don't… you do your best you can for things, but you can't… you won't recover everything, because you have to remember that you and I, when we pull the chain, it… where do you think it goes? It doesn't disappear into the sky, and that has to go somewhere.

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Alastair boyd: And people don't want it on their fields near them because of the smell.

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Alastair boyd: And there's a lot of restrictions, so it isn't only animals that cause a problem, it's more likely us than anybody else. And until you stop chucking two gallons after half a pint, then we're going to have a water shortage.

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Sue Burton: Yeah, yes.

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Sue Burton: Well…

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Sue Burton: Yeah, that actually… that brings on to… you mentioned about, like, the… in… you had the reduction in flow of the fresh water coming in, and so you had a… practically a shortage of what you could give the cattle, or what you… if that's my understanding. What can we do as the people in this…

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Sue Burton: setup of turning our taps on. I think you just mentioned how much water… we're using too much water to flush away a pea, basically. So we can help by being economical with our water at home, water butts, et cetera, et cetera.

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Alastair boyd: Yeah, the trouble is, you have water parts this year, after a month, they're empty.

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Alastair boyd: And they stayed empty for 5 months.

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Sue Burton: On our town council, we bought a huge water collecting point that some councilors were dead against, because it was £20,000 worth, and we had enough water for the whole of that dry period, 8 weeks of nothing, and we were able to water all the plants in the town, and I want to try and think how we can share it, rather than just the

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Sue Burton: Town Council, Flowers and stuff, but anyway.

375

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Alastair boyd: I think here we've got the water under the downs, and that depends on the rain falling down into it.

376

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Sue Burton: Hmm.

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Alastair boyd: so the M20 was built through the farm, or was on.

378

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Alastair boyd: And they… they… when they went through this bank, they found two water levels. A suspended water table, which they cut through where they bulldozed and drained. They then came down onto the motorway itself, and where the concrete was… the sand where the concrete was to go.

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Alastair boyd: They had to put in a bridge apartment, and in doing so, they had to dig a hole. This water was level with the top of the sand. It's a beautiful turquoise color.

380

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Alastair boyd: And they put in a 9-inch pump. They dug a 20-foot hole, they put a 9-inch pump in it pumped, and nothing happened.

381

00:39:15.700 --> 00:39:31.980

Alastair boyd: They put in four pumps, and nothing happened. They then had to go and well point, they call it, where they drain a specific rectangle to dry enough to get the concrete in it, which they did. Then they put a French drain in for about 7 or 8 feet deep.

382

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Alastair boyd: Alongside the motorway, and that… trained.

383

00:39:36.210 --> 00:39:39.360

Alastair boyd: Water for 7 feet for a kilometre around.

384

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Alastair boyd: Now, at Charing now, they have… one of the pumps is out of the water in the summertime.

385

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Alastair boyd: So that… that water's got going… went down the river, and it's still going down the river. They should never have been allowed. But we tried to stop them, but they… the government didn't take any notice of it.

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Sue Burton: Whoa.

387

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Alastair boyd: But, so, that's… that's something that could have been done, but the concern, as far as the road construction people were concerned, they didn't want their bridge to collapse.

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Alastair boyd: And I dare say that's gone on all the way down through. When they built the Channel Tunnel.

389

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Alastair boyd: They were supposed to desalinate the water from sea.

390

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Alastair boyd: to wash the sand that they use for constructing the tunnel. Instead, they put wells down into wells into the folks and beds, and suck the plain water. But it takes several years for this stuff to make up for. So there's different things going on, which… or have gone on, which have mucked the whole job up. They can't be really rectified.

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Sue Burton: Whoa.

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Sue Burton: Thank you, Alastair. Lots of… lots of knowledge there you've got.

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Alastair boyd: I don't know about that, but it's just… it's things that, it's very difficult.

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Alastair boyd: I… I don't know how… how…

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Alastair boyd: depleted the water is at Chang. There used to be… if you imagine, the downs.

396

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Alastair boyd: And the soils being at 45 degrees, because I think at one time, possibly the North Downs, south downs was one cap over the whole thing. It's just a roadway.

397

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Alastair boyd: But the,

398

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Alastair boyd: bottom layer is the… I think it's the hive beds where the water is finally contains underneath the downs.

399

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Alastair boyd: When that has a very thin clay layer that parts it from the function sands.

400

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Alastair boyd: And the water, when they overfilled, it used to come out of springs right along the downs that fed all the rivers.

401

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Alastair boyd: No, you don't get any of that.

402

00:41:27.660 --> 00:41:29.030

Alastair boyd: The springs are dry.

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Alastair boyd: And it's because the water doesn't… doesn't come up as it used to, because of these two… we had a mile of motorway and a mile of high-speed railway that just cut into all the water supplies through the natural water springs.

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Sue Burton: Wow.

405

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Sue Burton: Thank you so much.

406

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Pam, are you all set to go?

407

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: You're on mute at the moment.

408

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Pam Rosling? Yes, you are with us.

409

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Pam Rosling: Oh, sorry, I could hardly hear you.

410

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Pam Rosling: Right, okay. I put my question in the chat, which is basically about the fact that, Gen Z

411

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Pam Rosling: Only, hmm, 14, 14…

412

00:42:19.260 --> 00:42:20.309

Alastair boyd: and hoo-hoo?

413

00:42:20.760 --> 00:42:24.230

Pam Rosling: Gen Z, you know, younger people.

414

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Alastair boyd: I'm too old for noting all that. Cool.

415

00:42:27.470 --> 00:42:32.450

Pam Rosling: sort of the younger people from the 90s, I suppose,

416

00:42:32.760 --> 00:42:41.179

Pam Rosling: And 41%, I've just looked up these statistics, 41% don't eat any meat.

417

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Pam Rosling: And the general trend, I think, for the whole population was 24.2%. Anyway, the figures are in the chat there.

418

00:42:51.330 --> 00:42:57.219

Pam Rosling: And as there's going to be a drop in meat consumption.

419

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Pam Rosling: Why are livestock farmers not switching to vegetables, fruit, and crops, which are actually for human consumption, rather than

420

00:43:07.790 --> 00:43:13.219

Pam Rosling: livestock, which is the dominant, feature of our agriculture, I believe.

421

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Pam Rosling: Particularly as… with all the crises threatened to us, you know, from climate and wars and…

422

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Pam Rosling: whatever happens, there's going to be a need for us to be resilient in our food supplies in the UK, which really means using the land to the best,

423

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Pam Rosling: dietary consumption requirement for the whole population, and I think livestock uses an awful lot more land and water than growing crops.

424

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Pam Rosling: So, what's your answer to that?

425

00:43:48.710 --> 00:43:52.029

Alastair boyd: You can only grow crops on the land that you can grow it on.

426

00:43:52.140 --> 00:43:56.829

Alastair boyd: You can grow… put livestock on land which wouldn't be fit for arable.

427

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Alastair boyd: Have you looked at the back of the packet of the, made-up meat, or so-called meat, in your supermarket?

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Pam Rosling: Sorry, what are you talking about?

429

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Alastair boyd: Have you looked at the back of the packet of your, make-believe meat?

430

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Pam Rosling: I don't eat make-believe meat. I…

431

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Alastair boyd: It's based on fungus and things, the, alternative bead.

432

00:44:24.480 --> 00:44:27.460

Pam Rosling: Sorry, we grow our own vegetables, and we…

433

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Alastair boyd: No, no, when you, when you, you're talking about zero, or whatever, 10%, or whatever it is.

434

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Pam Rosling: Believe me.

435

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Alastair boyd: When you… when you… they are buying product, have you looked to the back of the packet to see what it's made of?

436

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I don't think they're substituting.

437

00:44:44.110 --> 00:44:45.880

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Real meat for the full sprawler.

438

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Alastair boyd: What they're doing is that if you've got all the additives and everything else is made up to make it up, to make it look like meat.

439

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Pam Rosling: I never buy that sort of thing.

440

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Alastair boyd: I'll just have a look. Quite interesting.

441

00:44:58.730 --> 00:44:59.700

Pam Rosling: Yeah, we, we…

442

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Alastair boyd: It used to be… it used to be E-numbers, was everybody was up about it, but now it's what it's actually made of.

443

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Pam Rosling: If you grow your own organic vegetables, there's no need for meat.

444

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Alastair boyd: You… you're talking about a garden, I'm talking about 240 acres. You can't grow 240 acres on clay, not vegetables.

445

00:45:20.690 --> 00:45:23.549

Alastair boyd: The land will not… that land is not good enough for that.

446

00:45:24.730 --> 00:45:30.669

Alastair boyd: It's… even the fruit growers are pulling trees out.

447

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Alastair boyd: People buy fruit from abroad at the moment, and they'd rather buy it from abroad than bring it in from South Africa or wherever.

448

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Pam Rosling: Really? Okay.

449

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Alastair boyd: Thank you.

450

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Pam Rosling: Some people should strand us.

451

00:45:48.540 --> 00:45:52.459

Alastair boyd: Well, yeah, but are they producing… are they small trees?

452

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Pam Rosling: I haven't inspected them, sorry.

453

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Alastair boyd: If you look at them, the old original orchards have all gone.

454

00:46:00.450 --> 00:46:02.930

Alastair boyd: And they've put in a hole of these small ones.

455

00:46:03.060 --> 00:46:10.189

Alastair boyd: So whereas a tree, a big tree might have 50 apples on it, a small tree will have 20, but there'll be about a dozen more trees per area.

456

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Pam Rosling: Right. Well, we get our supplies from, an organic grower.

457

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Pam Rosling: farm in Dorset, and there never seems to be a shortage, so…

458

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Alastair boyd: That's fair enough.

459

00:46:23.160 --> 00:46:24.280

Alastair boyd: That's fair enough.

460

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Pam Rosling: Okay.

461

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Pam Rosling: Thanks.

462

00:46:29.000 --> 00:46:34.389

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Alastair, we had a… Presentation a few weeks ago from,

463

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: a family on the Isle of Wight that's producing worms to try and improve the quality of the land. I mean, is that feasible over the sort of areas you're talking about?

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Alastair boyd: Well, the farmer near us, he went into it in a big way.

465

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Alastair boyd: And, he stopped. And I would take it as he stopped that it wasn't successful, but I wasn't involved with actually what it did. Certainly, worms are helpful.

466

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Alastair boyd: Anything like that.

467

00:47:02.510 --> 00:47:04.930

Alastair boyd: But the trouble is, when you get this dry weather.

468

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Alastair boyd: the… a lot of these things go deeper and deeper to strike… so they can find moisture. It's the same with slugs.

469

00:47:11.390 --> 00:47:18.280

Alastair boyd: You know, if they get, very dry weather, they just keep going down to keep where they can get some moisture.

470

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Alastair boyd: But the difference… you've got the advantage… we've got the so-called advantage.

471

00:47:25.210 --> 00:47:27.459

Alastair boyd: Soil is made up of rock particles.

472

00:47:27.780 --> 00:47:36.919

Alastair boyd: the play is very small particles. The water coming up, the capillary action from water, it has to go around each piece of rock.

473

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Alastair boyd: Right? So it comes up. So that tends to keep going in clay up to the surface. If you've got sand which has got larger lumps, larger stones, it… the water doesn't run up as fast enough, and that's why a lot of the crops die out. So it's really soil types for jobs.

474

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Alastair boyd: If you go on the East Kent, they grew a huge amount of vegetables at one time. Now they're not. They're growing either tomato greenhouses or solar panels.

475

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Alastair boyd: It's, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy.

476

00:48:08.990 --> 00:48:14.559

Alastair boyd: But it all is the economic demand. Nobody's going to produce anything unless it gets a return.

477

00:48:16.730 --> 00:48:17.500

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Drew.

478

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Alastair boyd: The demand creates the supply.

479

00:48:26.310 --> 00:48:28.199

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: There's a… a large…

480

00:48:28.320 --> 00:48:41.629

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: ish organization on the island called the Garlic Farm, which is producing a vast amounts. They've got 100 acres of garlic, and they reckon they've had a 20 or 30% increase in production through using the worms.

481

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: And then…

482

00:48:42.580 --> 00:48:43.040

Alastair boyd: Good weather.

483

00:48:43.440 --> 00:48:55.989

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: they're now buying worm factories to keep… because they now want to start market gardening, and then get the same result. But if they've run out of water, I guess, as you say, the worms go deeper, that creates more problems.

484

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Alastair boyd: If you've got a ground about right, the lady's talking about the garden. If you've got worms in your garden, you feed them with all the, debris and waste that they've done there, they'll thrive. But if they have nothing to eat, or… then they'll die out.

485

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Well, there's there.

486

00:49:11.240 --> 00:49:17.610

Alastair boyd: very sorry when you shot one and a half with a spade, because when I was younger, they said, oh, the two halves still live.

487

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Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: The way that they're doing it locally is that they're generating compost to feed to the worms, and therefore everything is sort of getting circularity, really. It seems to be working, but…

488

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Alastair boyd: Yeah.

489

00:49:30.750 --> 00:49:32.859

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I take it that it won't appeal…

490

00:49:33.050 --> 00:49:39.559

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: won't be eligible on a… on all parts of the… of the countryside. It depends very much on the soil…

491

00:49:39.560 --> 00:49:41.990

Alastair boyd: You're talking about such a vast area.

492

00:49:43.310 --> 00:49:46.490

Alastair boyd: But we… we made… we… when I came down here.

493

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Alastair boyd: we couldn't, grow anything in the garden. It's only about 3 inches of topsoil. So I made up beds, and I brought in beet wash.

494

00:49:54.280 --> 00:49:57.450

Alastair boyd: And, that's great stuff. It's silt.

495

00:49:57.630 --> 00:50:02.670

Alastair boyd: And it grew like stink. The only trouble was that he also built 14 red shank.

496

00:50:03.070 --> 00:50:07.159

Alastair boyd: And I've never seen redshank grow, and it's still growing now. It's, it's a…

497

00:50:07.290 --> 00:50:14.319

Alastair boyd: there were in the sole that walked down from Eastern County, so I got all the red shank. But, yeah.

498

00:50:15.590 --> 00:50:17.939

Alastair boyd: Where that lady was talking just now about beef.

499

00:50:18.220 --> 00:50:24.360

Alastair boyd: There's a lot of… some people report of going back to beef because their health is failing.

500

00:50:25.230 --> 00:50:29.239

Alastair boyd: Because they're not getting enough of the nutrients from the…

501

00:50:29.420 --> 00:50:31.000

Alastair boyd: Corn, or whatever they call it.

502

00:50:31.310 --> 00:50:34.180

Alastair boyd: And I don't really want to live on a… on a mushroom.

503

00:50:34.510 --> 00:50:36.449

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Put it in place.

504

00:50:36.450 --> 00:50:44.659

Alastair boyd: all this stuff in the tub. I cannot understand why these people want to make their artificial food look like

505

00:50:44.780 --> 00:50:50.540

Alastair boyd: natural food. If they want it, they, as, just for the feed.

506

00:50:50.680 --> 00:50:53.970

Alastair boyd: Then, have it as it looks, not keep adding

507

00:50:54.090 --> 00:51:04.100

Alastair boyd: Because I think there's somewhere they said there's something they make up, and they put, beetroot juice in it, so that when they cut it, it bleeds, so it looks like meat. I thought, what are you doing?

508

00:51:05.460 --> 00:51:15.249

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I'm not sure what percentage of the people who are switching to a more vegetable diet are actually looking for substitute meat. I think they're just abandoning meat altogether, aren't they?

509

00:51:15.250 --> 00:51:19.760

Alastair boyd: Well… I don't know, I see a lot of, in the supermarkets, people buying this stuff.

510

00:51:20.390 --> 00:51:29.199

Alastair boyd: It's just their right to do what they like, but, I think there's so much advertising goes into it, there must be a hell of a lot of profit made out of it.

511

00:51:30.380 --> 00:51:35.709

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: There's a couple of questions in the chat, Alice, I don't know, do you have access to the chat?

512

00:51:35.710 --> 00:51:37.369

Alastair boyd: But I haven't opened it.

513

00:51:37.370 --> 00:51:42.760

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Okay, so if I come down to… the first question is from Richard Stowe.

514

00:51:43.550 --> 00:51:46.199

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Who's asking about regenerative arable?

515

00:51:46.520 --> 00:51:50.620

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Particularly under sowing with clover, and with the benefits for weed control.

516

00:51:52.680 --> 00:51:53.880

Alastair boyd: That certainly would help.

517

00:51:54.000 --> 00:51:56.770

Alastair boyd: But the clover,

518

00:51:56.950 --> 00:52:07.000

Alastair boyd: Some red clovers, if you've got beef cattle or breeding cattle, some red clovers have a hormone in it which makes it difficult to… for them to breed from.

519

00:52:07.090 --> 00:52:18.280

Alastair boyd: But, if you have cover crops in the autumn, and you're doing spring growth, you can put in green plants, like mustard and things like that.

520

00:52:18.430 --> 00:52:24.150

Alastair boyd: which will grow like stink. You plough it in, and that gives another nutrient into the soil.

521

00:52:25.040 --> 00:52:27.399

Alastair boyd: It is quite worrying if this… this…

522

00:52:27.730 --> 00:52:36.279

Alastair boyd: The soil gets compacted and the like, and it will seize the warmth, moisture, and air, and if you tramp one of them out, then you haven't got a crop.

523

00:52:37.110 --> 00:52:37.770

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Hmm.

524

00:52:38.900 --> 00:52:41.699

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Certainly around us, there's a lot of,

525

00:52:42.170 --> 00:52:53.250

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: concern about the quality of the soil that over the centuries, it's been so depleted that now they're really going to have to work on restoring it to a decent nutrient capacity.

526

00:52:53.250 --> 00:53:03.070

Alastair boyd: There used to be an old farm mixture of roots, barley, seeds, wheat, which was the Norfolk rotation, and each crop used to benefit the next one.

527

00:53:03.070 --> 00:53:03.900

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Yeah, that is…

528

00:53:03.900 --> 00:53:08.060

Alastair boyd: If there's no call for the crop, then it won't grow.

529

00:53:08.320 --> 00:53:09.280

Alastair boyd: Big round.

530

00:53:10.640 --> 00:53:27.869

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: So, we've got a question here from Andrew, who doesn't have voice at the moment, so let me ask a question for him. What are the three most important strategies that you'd like to see DEFRA adopt to ensure that you and your colleagues can guarantee our food security as the climate begins to bite us?

531

00:53:28.710 --> 00:53:31.919

Alastair boyd: Dear. Where do you start?

532

00:53:37.460 --> 00:53:45.429

Alastair boyd: I think if they're going to interfere with… the natural… But, farming world.

533

00:53:45.590 --> 00:53:57.729

Alastair boyd: they should… if they put grants in… they put so many obstructions in the way. I've got a form here I've got to fill in for 3 or 4 pages of stuff I've got to fill in here for a thing we've just put in.

534

00:53:57.860 --> 00:54:01.900

Alastair boyd: Difficult.

535

00:54:03.430 --> 00:54:10.840

Alastair boyd: Grants… when we… when… we really need to know what we're gonna get for produce…

536

00:54:11.150 --> 00:54:17.859

Alastair boyd: Before we start doing it. In… back in the 60s, there was the, deficiency payment.

537

00:54:18.040 --> 00:54:26.579

Alastair boyd: And every year, the farmers' leaders and all the rest of the people met the government, and they thrashed out how much the crop a week was going to be.

538

00:54:27.400 --> 00:54:37.070

Alastair boyd: And that… so the farmers would grow it, because they'd know they've got a price at the end. If it went up beyond that, then they lost out. If they went below that, they'd always got a base level.

539

00:54:37.370 --> 00:54:49.610

Alastair boyd: So then the bread was made, and a taxpayer went to the bakery and bought their loaf of bread. Within that price was the… their tax they'd paid

540

00:54:49.700 --> 00:54:59.479

Alastair boyd: was towards it. If they weren't a taxpayer, they got a theoretical subsidy for it, but everybody knew where they were. Now, you don't know where you are.

541

00:54:59.930 --> 00:55:19.039

Alastair boyd: You're completely at the… at Ashford, if the buyers didn't turn up one week, and you've got your cattle in there, you'd either have to bring them home, which would mean a whole load of draws on isolations and all the rest of it, because they… once they move off the place, they have to be registered, or you sold them cheap.

542

00:55:21.970 --> 00:55:29.540

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: So it sounds like one of your answers is that one of the most important strategies that DEFRA could adopt would be to give a firm price base for everybody.

543

00:55:29.540 --> 00:55:34.789

Alastair boyd: Yeah, so you knew what… that's the ideal. If you knew what you were gonna get, you made the choice with your brewing.

544

00:55:35.690 --> 00:55:37.179

Alastair boyd: But you can't do that.

545

00:55:38.950 --> 00:55:40.379

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Well, that's one out of three.

546

00:55:40.380 --> 00:55:50.849

Alastair boyd: You take this year, somebody who had sold their wheat forward, which is the attack they used to make sure they knew what they were going to get, as such, only on a commercial basis.

547

00:55:51.330 --> 00:55:53.550

Alastair boyd: And the production's dropped.

548

00:55:53.760 --> 00:56:04.979

Alastair boyd: Now some of them are having to buy in wheat to pay the… to get out the contract, because the contract supply so many tons, and they can't, so they've got to make it up.

549

00:56:07.090 --> 00:56:09.530

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Which is meant to be a loss-making, isn't it?

550

00:56:18.110 --> 00:56:21.429

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I'm just going through the questions to see which ones we haven't covered yet.

551

00:56:31.760 --> 00:56:41.649

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Well, a few items from Richard stow. Richard, are you in a position to join us with your own voice, rather than my doing it for you?

552

00:56:46.050 --> 00:56:47.250

richard stow: Hello there!

553

00:56:50.530 --> 00:56:51.839

richard stow: Can you hear me?

554

00:56:51.840 --> 00:56:52.930

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Yes, you're fine.

555

00:56:53.150 --> 00:57:01.309

richard stow: Okay, right, so… I'm an environmental scientist, but I have farmed for something like,

556

00:57:02.940 --> 00:57:09.249

richard stow: 15, maybe 20 years of my life, but not at the moment, but I'm… I am still involved on the kind of fringes.

557

00:57:09.650 --> 00:57:10.480

richard stow: No.

558

00:57:10.940 --> 00:57:20.749

richard stow: I've… I've got a diverse background. So, there's so many issues, aren't there, really? I mean, the issue about markets is really…

559

00:57:20.890 --> 00:57:27.879

richard stow: unwinding the privatisation of the Milk Marketing Board, and the Meat and Livestock Commission, and things like that.

560

00:57:28.040 --> 00:57:28.430

Alastair boyd: Yep.

561

00:57:28.430 --> 00:57:31.150

richard stow: You know, so it's politics, really, isn't it?

562

00:57:31.420 --> 00:57:35.680

richard stow: You know, and… and, the Common Agricultural Policy as well.

563

00:57:36.970 --> 00:57:40.499

richard stow: We can't have it both ways, but there's… but there's,

564

00:57:41.450 --> 00:57:45.510

richard stow: I think there's always a middle ground somewhere, and we're probably…

565

00:57:45.840 --> 00:57:52.120

richard stow: we're probably grappling with that at the moment. As far as…

566

00:57:52.470 --> 00:57:59.180

richard stow: Livestock compared to arable crops, well…

567

00:58:01.790 --> 00:58:05.490

richard stow: I… so, I am vegetarian, but I have…

568

00:58:05.820 --> 00:58:12.639

richard stow: I have farmed, I've taken livestock to the abattoir, and things like that. I'm a sort of a realist.

569

00:58:12.930 --> 00:58:20.670

richard stow: I think the way we're moving is actually the right direction, so low input

570

00:58:20.880 --> 00:58:28.800

richard stow: livestock farming, I think, is definitely important. Reducing the numbers, improving the quality.

571

00:58:28.920 --> 00:58:32.210

richard stow: And…

572

00:58:32.550 --> 00:58:41.520

richard stow: vegetable protein, I mean, you know, it's quite interesting when you look at the kind of history of it, that, you know, we were… we were producing…

573

00:58:41.820 --> 00:58:44.700

richard stow: Pays and beans for human consumption.

574

00:58:45.130 --> 00:58:49.950

richard stow: For hundreds of years, really, and it probably came out of poverty as much as anything.

575

00:58:50.060 --> 00:58:56.420

richard stow: But there's definitely a way forward that we need to be exploring, and I think…

576

00:58:56.560 --> 00:59:02.960

richard stow: I think we are. So, like I've suggested in those posts, I mean…

577

00:59:03.230 --> 00:59:10.490

richard stow: both myself and other farmers that I've known, have, kind of, dabbled in…

578

00:59:10.850 --> 00:59:16.840

richard stow: In, in these things over the years. And…

579

00:59:17.560 --> 00:59:19.999

richard stow: We probably need to be raising the game.

580

00:59:20.290 --> 00:59:26.290

richard stow: On… On a transition to a more sustainable

581

00:59:27.550 --> 00:59:36.200

richard stow: agriculture. And I think, actually, policy is… is taking us in that direction. That…

582

00:59:36.420 --> 00:59:39.750

richard stow: Profit margins are tight.

583

00:59:39.880 --> 00:59:47.699

richard stow: So… So, risk, so it has to be as risk-averse as possible.

584

00:59:48.080 --> 00:59:57.000

richard stow: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an open…

585

00:59:57.850 --> 01:00:04.030

richard stow: open, playing field at the moment, if that's… if that's a phrase I'm looking for.

586

01:00:04.930 --> 01:00:08.989

Alastair boyd: Well, supply and demand is going to be the thing that runs it.

587

01:00:09.200 --> 01:00:12.520

Alastair boyd: I mean, if people have a no demand, there's nothing produced.

588

01:00:12.520 --> 01:00:13.010

richard stow: Yeah.

589

01:00:13.010 --> 01:00:16.150

Alastair boyd: We can't do cereals on this farm.

590

01:00:16.370 --> 01:00:20.120

Alastair boyd: What I did do when I first started out, before my son came home.

591

01:00:20.420 --> 01:00:26.109

Alastair boyd: And the contractor took the whole value of the crop in the contract charges.

592

01:00:26.370 --> 01:00:36.490

Alastair boyd: Because I can't warrant on this acre area a 500,000 or 1 million pound combine, and I can't have all the plant machinery.

593

01:00:36.920 --> 01:00:43.730

Alastair boyd: Not for the size of here, the only thing you do is… and then you're completely at the mercy of the contractor.

594

01:00:44.110 --> 01:00:44.810

richard stow: Yeah.

595

01:00:45.310 --> 01:00:46.160

richard stow: Yeah.

596

01:00:46.160 --> 01:00:50.310

Alastair boyd: I think it's a free country, everybody can eat what they want to eat.

597

01:00:50.690 --> 01:01:00.630

Alastair boyd: And they can be moral if they want to be, but there's no point in us mistreating any animal, because it's not going to produce, so why would you want to do that?

598

01:01:00.630 --> 01:01:01.190

richard stow: Oh.

599

01:01:01.190 --> 01:01:07.980

Alastair boyd: And they… we've made it now, they go from… they live here, they go about, 10 miles, and they end their life.

600

01:01:08.270 --> 01:01:11.400

Alastair boyd: And they've been on the farm all the time, they've gone nowhere else.

601

01:01:12.070 --> 01:01:14.770

Alastair boyd: So you can't get it much more humane or whatever.

602

01:01:17.550 --> 01:01:23.120

richard stow: I quite agree. I mean, like I say, I think there's a middle ground. I mean, I'm not suggesting that

603

01:01:23.390 --> 01:01:25.689

richard stow: You know, we should stop producing

604

01:01:26.260 --> 01:01:30.080

richard stow: Meets, because of, you know, we're,

605

01:01:30.510 --> 01:01:36.359

richard stow: omnivores anyway, and we've all got that choice. You know, there are kind of degrees

606

01:01:37.060 --> 01:01:45.100

richard stow: Between one position and the other. But…

607

01:01:45.820 --> 01:01:52.160

richard stow: You know, if the market is shifting like that,

608

01:01:52.660 --> 01:02:00.940

richard stow: then… then we always have to… whatever we're… whatever we're making, really, we have to… we have to follow the market. Or…

609

01:02:01.030 --> 01:02:13.869

richard stow: or be innovative and add value to… to the product. And that's… that's… that's what I see as the way to reduce the risk, really. To… to kind of dip your… dip your toe in

610

01:02:14.580 --> 01:02:23.400

richard stow: Cautiously, so, so, I, like, as I've suggested in those, those, Posts.

611

01:02:24.830 --> 01:02:35.080

richard stow: Crop trials, whatever the local opportunities are, farm gate sales, rather than going through wholesale.

612

01:02:35.250 --> 01:02:47.570

richard stow: Things like that. And then, with climate change, you know, we're seeing… We're seeing,

613

01:02:47.970 --> 01:02:57.349

richard stow: People talking about, you know, agroforestry, and growing fruit trays, in…

614

01:02:57.490 --> 01:03:04.779

richard stow: In, in a mix with, with, arable and livestock farming.

615

01:03:05.110 --> 01:03:12.850

richard stow: To provide shelter, to shade, windbreaks,

616

01:03:13.100 --> 01:03:17.610

richard stow: And alternative, income streams at the same time.

617

01:03:19.950 --> 01:03:30.560

Alastair boyd: But you'll be well aware that if you've got trees or hedges, you've got, particularly this year, you've got about 6 feet of the land to the side of them that's completely died out, because it's been droughted out.

618

01:03:31.030 --> 01:03:32.000

richard stow: Yeah.

619

01:03:32.000 --> 01:03:44.009

Alastair boyd: And we owe so much to the people before us, I suspect possibly you were involved in it, the geneticists who have brought on the crops to be able to produce so much more.

620

01:03:44.390 --> 01:03:54.529

Alastair boyd: You know, when I was younger, the wheat production, you got one and a half tons of yake, and you thought, wow, that's fantastic. Now you're turning four or five tons of yake onto the same land.

621

01:03:54.780 --> 01:03:58.770

Alastair boyd: You know, the technology and everything else, and people should appreciate that.

622

01:03:58.930 --> 01:04:10.450

Alastair boyd: I realize that some people find that land has changed and everything else, but the… it's been demand-driven. And I think after the last war, when the… this country was

623

01:04:10.730 --> 01:04:15.060

Alastair boyd: virtually on its knees, and if it hadn't been for the Rosling and everything else.

624

01:04:15.710 --> 01:04:21.909

Alastair boyd: They're the catastro, and at the moment, we've got such a risk that the America's not going to help us.

625

01:04:22.360 --> 01:04:27.879

Alastair boyd: And you've got China who's taking over a lot of the food production in Africa.

626

01:04:28.310 --> 01:04:31.310

Alastair boyd: You've got to just look around who your friends really are.

627

01:04:32.090 --> 01:04:32.810

richard stow: Yeah.

628

01:04:33.630 --> 01:04:38.930

richard stow: But that… that also fits in with… You know, regenerative agriculture and…

629

01:04:39.400 --> 01:04:45.399

richard stow: Seemingly, without it necessarily even needing to be,

630

01:04:45.830 --> 01:04:51.780

richard stow: Registered Organic, but that it does seem as though the economics are shifting towards

631

01:04:52.000 --> 01:04:56.349

richard stow: Low inputs, whether it's livestock or arable,

632

01:04:56.590 --> 01:05:00.879

richard stow: Beginning to stack up as being a viable proposition.

633

01:05:02.510 --> 01:05:06.130

Alastair boyd: If the land is the price it is now, and the return that's needed.

634

01:05:06.410 --> 01:05:12.530

Alastair boyd: you… unless you're going to… you'll buy the land to avoid tax, which I think's out of the door now.

635

01:05:12.730 --> 01:05:15.689

Alastair boyd: Then you've got to be economical for your thing.

636

01:05:15.690 --> 01:05:16.070

richard stow: Yes.

637

01:05:16.070 --> 01:05:19.559

Alastair boyd: You can… you can starve the farmers, by all means. Get rid of all of us.

638

01:05:19.930 --> 01:05:22.469

Alastair boyd: And then sit down just to where you are.

639

01:05:22.470 --> 01:05:29.179

richard stow: Well, that's… you know, that's not what I'm suggest… I'm not suggesting anything in particular. I'm saying that there's a range of

640

01:05:29.570 --> 01:05:39.669

richard stow: of scenarios and opportunities and so on. So, you know, as far as land prices are concerned, that is a separate issue altogether. And that…

641

01:05:39.810 --> 01:05:41.250

richard stow: actually viable.

642

01:05:41.840 --> 01:05:55.229

richard stow: viable, new entry farming, is really as a tenant farmer, rather than buying the land, because you're right, that land prices have been driven so much by inheritance tax avoidance.

643

01:05:55.660 --> 01:06:03.310

richard stow: That it's not a viable… there's not a return to be had on… on… on land at the current…

644

01:06:03.520 --> 01:06:05.579

richard stow: Market pro… market price.

645

01:06:05.580 --> 01:06:09.029

Alastair boyd: The tense itself very well, but…

646

01:06:09.530 --> 01:06:13.489

Alastair boyd: People are prepared to give up their land for that period of time.

647

01:06:14.060 --> 01:06:22.550

Alastair boyd: Now they've changed the thing so that there isn't any period tendencies. It's a risk all the way around.

648

01:06:22.550 --> 01:06:23.840

richard stow: Yeah, yeah.

649

01:06:23.840 --> 01:06:26.530

Alastair boyd: risk all the way around. The best thing you can do is sit on the dole.

650

01:06:27.310 --> 01:06:34.479

richard stow: Well, no, that's not an option either, but… but, you know, supporting

651

01:06:34.910 --> 01:06:40.920

richard stow: Regenerative is the fact that the biggest carbon input, the biggest carbon demand on

652

01:06:41.340 --> 01:06:46.179

richard stow: On farming, really, is… is… is particularly nitrate fertiliser.

653

01:06:46.700 --> 01:06:54.389

richard stow: Depending on how you… how you model it, I think, I think the malting industry

654

01:06:54.690 --> 01:07:03.519

richard stow: Identified that something like 70% of the carbon footprint of Of, of beer, say.

655

01:07:03.810 --> 01:07:08.240

richard stow: Is actually the nitrate fertilizer going into the barley production.

656

01:07:09.520 --> 01:07:16.869

Alastair boyd: Well, you wouldn't put too much nitrogen in barley for malting, because that beggars up the quality of it.

657

01:07:17.360 --> 01:07:26.229

richard stow: Well, and I'm sure it's achievable, because You know, we've got… We've got,

658

01:07:26.860 --> 01:07:32.340

richard stow: Organic barley, we've got organic beer, so… so clearly it must be working.

659

01:07:32.340 --> 01:07:44.719

Alastair boyd: It's a great idea until you realize that China is the Northern Hemisphere, and the air that's running around the world is coming from there. The amount of pollution is coming from them. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do our best to try and mitigate it, but we are rather…

660

01:07:44.720 --> 01:07:56.419

Alastair boyd: blowing in the wind to try and make it for the world. Well, whatever comes from America is what comes from America in the air. It's great to try and safeguard the ground, but

661

01:07:56.730 --> 01:07:57.550

Alastair boyd: Yeah.

662

01:07:57.890 --> 01:07:58.480

richard stow: Yeah.

663

01:07:58.870 --> 01:08:02.719

richard stow: But, you know, so… so we can be smog about having.

664

01:08:02.970 --> 01:08:04.390

Alastair boyd: Exactly.

665

01:08:04.390 --> 01:08:06.160

richard stow: The Secretary sounds.

666

01:08:06.160 --> 01:08:09.649

Alastair boyd: Maybe we're the world leaders in something, and go wrong ourselves.

667

01:08:09.650 --> 01:08:15.940

richard stow: Yeah, we're buying stuff, we're buying in from America and China also, you know.

668

01:08:16.750 --> 01:08:21.400

richard stow: Yes, so it makes the case for, generally, for self-sufficiency.

669

01:08:21.649 --> 01:08:22.670

richard stow: That's been the idea.

670

01:08:22.670 --> 01:08:25.499

Alastair boyd: We could stick our fingers up to everybody, but you can't do it.

671

01:08:25.840 --> 01:08:26.380

richard stow: Maybe.

672

01:08:26.380 --> 01:08:27.010

Alastair boyd: people, too many.

673

01:08:27.010 --> 01:08:27.969

richard stow: Again, maybe?

674

01:08:27.979 --> 01:08:28.559

Alastair boyd: Yeah.

675

01:08:28.560 --> 01:08:33.800

richard stow: Maybe that brings us back to Europe, really, doesn't it? The role of Europe in this.

676

01:08:33.800 --> 01:08:37.020

Alastair boyd: Well, look over at France, would you want to be involved in there at the moment?

677

01:08:39.620 --> 01:08:40.350

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Sorry, Greg.

678

01:08:40.359 --> 01:08:41.269

richard stow: I mean, again, tos.

679

01:08:41.270 --> 01:08:42.139

Alastair boyd: too long.

680

01:08:42.149 --> 01:08:42.839

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Go ahead.

681

01:08:43.229 --> 01:08:51.679

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: of crop that you mentioned, you were getting, sort of, two or three times as much from an acre of wheat as you used to. Does that exhaust.

682

01:08:53.859 --> 01:09:00.599

Alastair boyd: Livestock has been bred up. You've got grain, and all the plants have all been bred up.

683

01:09:00.719 --> 01:09:17.269

Alastair boyd: Some of them, have been using genome energy, which has been rejected, this country, because of all the things it's theoretically supposed to do. I don't know whether it's better or not. But all this breeding of things. You've got to either get more from the area.

684

01:09:17.899 --> 01:09:21.549

Alastair boyd: Or the population will just beat us.

685

01:09:21.979 --> 01:09:24.309

richard stow: Yeah, or you… or you innovate.

686

01:09:24.639 --> 01:09:31.169

richard stow: I mean… So, for instance, you know, barley… barley grown,

687

01:09:32.239 --> 01:09:47.539

richard stow: in… in a rotation with… with legumes, is… is producing, I think, a similar yield, or certainly a viable yield without nitrate fertiliser input.

688

01:09:47.540 --> 01:09:54.589

Alastair boyd: How do you get the barley out for malting that's mixed in with a load of legume seeds?

689

01:09:54.850 --> 01:09:59.799

richard stow: Well, if it's… if it's, if it's clover, then that's entirely viable.

690

01:09:59.800 --> 01:10:06.480

Alastair boyd: Oh yeah, clover, yeah. Yeah. But I don't… I think the clover would probably smother the, the barley.

691

01:10:06.690 --> 01:10:08.400

richard stow: It depends on the variety, doesn't it?

692

01:10:08.400 --> 01:10:10.950

Alastair boyd: You'd want… you'd want the… the… the…

693

01:10:11.160 --> 01:10:15.819

Alastair boyd: It takes a year or two for the clovers to establish itself, especially the sort of white clomas.

694

01:10:15.820 --> 01:10:16.230

richard stow: Yeah.

695

01:10:16.230 --> 01:10:23.180

Alastair boyd: And, and, you need to… any property, you're going to try and drill barley into it?

696

01:10:23.180 --> 01:10:25.480

richard stow: Well, I think you can direct drill into it.

697

01:10:27.070 --> 01:10:28.480

Alastair boyd: Interesting idea.

698

01:10:29.010 --> 01:10:29.850

Alastair boyd: I'd like to see…

699

01:10:29.850 --> 01:10:30.440

richard stow: I don't…

700

01:10:30.440 --> 01:10:31.629

Alastair boyd: Practice on it.

701

01:10:31.630 --> 01:10:40.400

richard stow: It's being done, so I… On… on actually quite a large scale in some parts of the world.

702

01:10:40.400 --> 01:10:43.109

Alastair boyd: Well, then you get somebody to try it?

703

01:10:43.110 --> 01:10:43.720

richard stow: Yeah.

704

01:10:44.260 --> 01:10:45.390

richard stow: Airways Oversight.

705

01:10:45.390 --> 01:10:46.570

Alastair boyd: And it's got to work.

706

01:10:46.570 --> 01:10:54.639

richard stow: So you're saying about… so you… so we've got to a position with both crops and livestock, really, where we've… where we've bred

707

01:10:56.850 --> 01:11:01.129

richard stow: disease resistance and things like that, but that comes at a price as well.

708

01:11:01.450 --> 01:11:10.420

richard stow: Alternative way of looking at that is things like… Cereals grown with, I…

709

01:11:11.520 --> 01:11:21.200

richard stow: They call it, I think, a family, or a population, a population. So you're growing multiple varieties.

710

01:11:22.750 --> 01:11:26.009

richard stow: Of wheat, say, in a… in a crop.

711

01:11:26.550 --> 01:11:34.619

richard stow: Rather than one specific one, so that you're diversifying the disease risk within that crop.

712

01:11:34.750 --> 01:11:43.060

richard stow: So if you… if you get an attack, you know, a serious rust attack or something like that, then you might lose…

713

01:11:43.680 --> 01:11:49.320

richard stow: 10% or 20%, rather than the whole crop.

714

01:11:49.630 --> 01:11:57.470

richard stow: And the other thing about… about under sowing with clover, is that Rather than having a monocrop.

715

01:11:57.890 --> 01:12:06.010

richard stow: Of the weight. As soon as you introduce a second species into that field, you are…

716

01:12:06.210 --> 01:12:12.109

richard stow: Let's say, halving, the risk of,

717

01:12:14.980 --> 01:12:23.989

richard stow: An insect's, attack, simply by, diversifying the ecology, if you like, of that field.

718

01:12:23.990 --> 01:12:25.320

Alastair boyd: What about weed control?

719

01:12:26.000 --> 01:12:28.550

richard stow: Well, again,

720

01:12:28.930 --> 01:12:38.809

richard stow: it's manageable. I mean, so… How? So that… so that a cover crop, especially clover, does reduce the…

721

01:12:39.090 --> 01:12:44.609

richard stow: The… the weed population, and then… and then…

722

01:12:45.580 --> 01:12:48.709

richard stow: A range of options, really, for…

723

01:12:49.070 --> 01:12:51.970

richard stow: Or, managing the issue,

724

01:12:52.660 --> 01:12:58.319

richard stow: So that the seed density and… The cultivation timing.

725

01:12:58.430 --> 01:13:02.180

richard stow: And all these things. Or all…

726

01:13:02.180 --> 01:13:09.620

Alastair boyd: There's a chemical control, with broadleafs and, and, Leaf, leaf-type plants.

727

01:13:10.030 --> 01:13:15.730

Alastair boyd: one can be sprayed out because it's got a weakness, like CMPP,

728

01:13:15.950 --> 01:13:19.949

Alastair boyd: And the other one uses CMPA. If you put one on the other one, you kill the other one.

729

01:13:19.950 --> 01:13:20.870

richard stow: Yeah.

730

01:13:20.870 --> 01:13:22.940

Alastair boyd: You have no sprites, who have no weeds.

731

01:13:23.400 --> 01:13:29.220

Alastair boyd: I think on Clarkson's farm, there's a gentleman, he grew something along the same lines you're talking about.

732

01:13:29.670 --> 01:13:32.290

Alastair boyd: And I don't think it was very successful, I don't know.

733

01:13:33.010 --> 01:13:41.730

richard stow: Well… I think there are… I think there are, very successful, exhausted.

734

01:13:41.730 --> 01:13:43.299

Alastair boyd: Show their up. I'm sure they're up.

735

01:13:43.300 --> 01:13:43.620

richard stow: Yeah.

736

01:13:43.620 --> 01:13:44.410

Alastair boyd: I'll try that.

737

01:13:45.040 --> 01:13:46.680

Alastair boyd: But it has to be commercial.

738

01:13:47.060 --> 01:13:48.729

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: One question from the…

739

01:13:48.730 --> 01:13:53.020

richard stow: You know, so they have to be sustainable at the same time, don't they?

740

01:13:53.020 --> 01:13:55.290

Alastair boyd: Well, that's… that's… that's the whole idea.

741

01:13:55.290 --> 01:13:57.639

richard stow: And that kind of commerce, as well, comes up front.

742

01:13:57.640 --> 01:14:00.249

Alastair boyd: land. Only a fool destroys land.

743

01:14:01.110 --> 01:14:08.730

Alastair boyd: You're looking at land going on for generations. It's the same as these people who are turf in. You take off an inch of soil with a turf.

744

01:14:09.070 --> 01:14:12.499

Alastair boyd: It takes 100 years to grow an inch of topsoil.

745

01:14:13.140 --> 01:14:13.700

richard stow: Yeah.

746

01:14:14.720 --> 01:14:16.429

richard stow: There isn't, there isn't one…

747

01:14:16.430 --> 01:14:18.299

Alastair boyd: in her garden. There isn't a.

748

01:14:18.300 --> 01:14:26.020

richard stow: one size fits all. No, but we have to… we do… you know, we are in a crisis, there's no doubt, I mean…

749

01:14:26.020 --> 01:14:26.570

Alastair boyd: That's right.

750

01:14:26.570 --> 01:14:32.199

richard stow: And we have to look at the whole range of options, really.

751

01:14:32.330 --> 01:14:41.850

richard stow: So I would say diversification, if it's in a word, it's probably diversification and crop trials.

752

01:14:42.170 --> 01:14:43.080

richard stow: Yep. Done.

753

01:14:43.340 --> 01:14:46.099

Alastair boyd: But your sole type limits to what you can do.

754

01:14:46.100 --> 01:14:47.690

richard stow: It does, yeah, yeah.

755

01:14:48.410 --> 01:14:57.319

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: So the one question we've not answered for, the voiceless Andrew is, his farming friends all say, give them back control of their market.

756

01:14:58.130 --> 01:15:02.849

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: So, I'm not quite sure what that means. Have you lost control of all of your markets?

757

01:15:03.590 --> 01:15:09.479

Alastair boyd: We've got the buyers in such… huge buyers. There's so many that's gone out.

758

01:15:09.670 --> 01:15:11.150

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Right, so they determine everything.

759

01:15:11.150 --> 01:15:16.280

Alastair boyd: whether it's, likes of, Drain Market. Now, it's a worldwide market.

760

01:15:17.740 --> 01:15:19.959

Alastair boyd: And you're buying, you're only a…

761

01:15:20.240 --> 01:15:23.969

Alastair boyd: Fiddling it, the new lorry load goes into a damn great ship.

762

01:15:24.370 --> 01:15:27.040

Alastair boyd: This is just a pee in the ocean, excuse the phrase.

763

01:15:29.190 --> 01:15:29.749

Alastair boyd: But it doesn'.

764

01:15:29.750 --> 01:15:30.770

richard stow: moon again.

765

01:15:31.070 --> 01:15:36.940

richard stow: It comes back, really, to the EU, the Milk Marketing Board, and the Meat and Livestock Commission.

766

01:15:37.120 --> 01:15:37.650

Alastair boyd: Yeah.

767

01:15:37.960 --> 01:15:43.569

Alastair boyd: We're selling milk through the Milk Martin Board. You've guaranteed that they've bought your milk.

768

01:15:43.770 --> 01:15:50.080

Alastair boyd: they then distributed it through the whole of the country, by train or whatever. It worked well.

769

01:15:50.080 --> 01:15:50.810

richard stow: Yeah.

770

01:15:50.810 --> 01:16:05.530

Alastair boyd: But then… then they thought, oh, well, we'll make it different. And what happened? You've got the big dairies, would put together, they'd come along. I remember them coming along to us, asking… offering about 27, 28 pence a liter, which is way above everybody else.

771

01:16:05.990 --> 01:16:08.699

Alastair boyd: And what happens then? They bring in quotas.

772

01:16:08.810 --> 01:16:14.710

Alastair boyd: And then the quotas, they have the control of the quota, and you're tied up with them for so long.

773

01:16:17.750 --> 01:16:26.140

Alastair boyd: Even this, as I understand, this milk dropping from 43 to 35. That's through one of the big buyers. How many buyers are there for milk?

774

01:16:27.270 --> 01:16:28.819

Alastair boyd: And the most… the buyer…

775

01:16:28.820 --> 01:16:30.110

richard stow: about markets, forgiveness.

776

01:16:30.110 --> 01:16:31.070

Alastair boyd: anyway.

777

01:16:32.720 --> 01:16:34.450

richard stow: Plan about it, or…

778

01:16:34.450 --> 01:16:40.460

Alastair boyd: Yeah, go and look at Muller in the supermarket. They're sweet and dead only. Huge quantity stuff sold.

779

01:16:40.770 --> 01:16:41.430

richard stow: Yeah.

780

01:16:42.970 --> 01:16:47.849

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Well, if nothing else, this conversation has convinced me that I've done very wisely to stay out of farming.

781

01:16:52.400 --> 01:16:56.789

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Andrew, thank… Alastair, thank you very much for, entertaining us all, because…

782

01:16:56.790 --> 01:16:58.800

Alastair boyd: Sorry about that. That's a whole hour, good lord!

783

01:16:58.800 --> 01:17:02.219

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: No, no, no, yes, yes, time flies when you're having fun, right?

784

01:17:02.220 --> 01:17:03.650

Alastair boyd: I don't know about that.

785

01:17:03.650 --> 01:17:10.500

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: So, again, very grateful for you, for filling in. Thank you very much.

786

01:17:10.660 --> 01:17:11.850

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: And,

787

01:17:12.020 --> 01:17:18.930

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: I wish everyone the very best. Next week, we're going to be talked about, we're going back to basics for the,

788

01:17:19.190 --> 01:17:27.939

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: energy efficiencies at the individual and parish council levels, so we'll be talking to someone who's doing that in a parish council in Somerset.

789

01:17:28.460 --> 01:17:32.459

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: But thank you all for your time, thank you for joining us, thank you for the.

790

01:17:32.460 --> 01:17:35.290

Cllr Stuart Withington Gt Dunmow TC, Essex: Thank you. Good luck. Alastair. Thank you.

791

01:17:35.290 --> 01:17:36.630

Graham Stoddart-Stones - Great Collaboration - Bembridge: Yeah. Bye-bye.

792

01:17:36.790 --> 01:17:37.650

Alastair boyd: Brilliant.

<br>


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