Herefordshire crisp pioneer shares soil secrets

A Herefordshire farmer and entrepreneur has explained how a range of approaches to managing soil are boosting sustainability, both environmental and financial.

Mark Green is co-founder of Two Farmers crisps based at an award-winning family farm at Peterstow near Ross-on-Wye, where other root crops, cereals maize and other crops are also grown.

“In Herefordshire we have the best soils in the UK and can grow as many crops as you like in one county,” he told a recent conference organised by Herefordshire Council.

Having taken over the farm at the start of the century, “I saw it needed to be intensive yet sustainable, and a key part of that is the soil”, he said.

He started growing mixed cover crops in 2015, “to halt the soil’s decline, and put things back in it”, so giving better soil structure, drainage, moisture retention, organic matter and fertility.

Spring crops over more than half of the farm are followed in the autumn by a green cover crop, which is ploughed in the following spring.

“I then thought about what technology could bring to the farm,” Mr Green said.

Its soils were tested and mapped for key nutrients down to square-metre resolution, in order to support variable-rate fertiliser to “level up” the soil.

This also enabled variable-rate seeding – with more seeds on the better soils.

“The next step was satellite imagery,” he said. “Just looking at the green cover crops tells us how much fertiliser we need to put on where.”

Perhaps counter-intuitively, this means putting more fertiliser on the better areas, “because that is where your yield is coming from”.

Cereal yields within the rotation are also mapped, building up a picture year-on-year of which areas are productive and which aren’t.

“You then have to ask why that is, and whether that area could be put to different use,” he said, adding that without this information, “your profitable areas are subsidising the bad”.

He has concluded that soil organic matter “is the most important at the end of the day” as it determines drainage, moisture retention and crops’ access to minerals.

This too can be ascertained from satellite imagery he said, adding: “Don’t ask me how it works.”

“The next step is to compare the images to manual soil samples,” he said. “That too will be a huge help in looking after our soils.”

In a further change, “we were putting a lot of horse power into our soils, particularly seed bed forming,” he said. “We now try to move the soil around less, so improving our soil structure.”

Lastly, he said biochar, a mineralised form of wood and other green waste produced by partially combusting it in an oxygen-restricted environment, “could be huge for farming” buy storing carbon within the soil while making nutrients more accessible to crops.

This spring the farm intends to start producing its own biochar as a step towards making Two Farmers crisps carbon-neutral, in an approach he termed “insetting rather than offsetting”.

“This will be great for the product,” he said.

Chris Greenaway, manager of the extensive Garnstone Estate in north Herefordshire echoed the message of good soil management being key to sustainability.

“We don’t want nutrients leaching out in winter,” he told the conference. “They are valuable and to hold onto them you need soil structure.”

Meanwhile a seven-metre buffer strip of grass along a waterway, fenced off from livestock, “stops anything nasty getting in”.

But he added: “We would struggle to farm without (the herbicide) glyphosate, the alternatives are worse. We add mulches and humic acid to mitigate the harm.”

Herefordshire Council’s cabinet member for environment Coun Elissa Swinglehurst said afterwards: “There is a growing understanding in the wider farming community about the changes needed to ensure environmentally sustainable practices.

“Our farming communities include some real innovators and it was great to hear more about their experiences and successes.”