It’s an impressive achievement to be mentioned in the New Year Honours list, but dairy farmer John Holt looks slightly uncomfortable when asked what it’s like to be awarded a British Empire Medal for his work on sustainability.
“I’m not really sure why I was nominated,” he says, modestly. “It was by someone in the village”
A British Empire Medal (BEM) honours individuals who have made a substantial, hands-on contribution to their local community, such as community champions, volunteers or charity workers.
John is very much involved in the local community. He served as a parish councillor for 12 years and is also a churchwarden.
He is a third-generation farmer running two tenant farms, Manor Farm and Droke Farm, both of which are part of the Goodwood Estate and sit within the South Downs National Park in West Sussex.
John, and his wife, Janet, have six children, and it is their son, Harry, who is a partner in the business and is also managing Goodwood Farm, a contract they began three years ago and is proving a useful string to their farming bow.
Farming a simplified system
John looks after Droke Farm, where the main focus is a 240-strong organic Holstein dairy herd. “We have tried to simplify our system here,” he says. “We used to be dairy, arable and sheep, but now we are just focusing on the dairy. All the crops we grow – forage and grain – are fed to the cows.
“Goodwood Estate, our landlords, have been organic for many years. We only started our conversion nine years ago. It takes two years to convert the land, so we have been fully organic for seven years now. We have a good contract for organic milk through Arla, a farmer-owned cooperative and we are really fortunate at the moment because organic milk seems to be in demand, and the price has maintained well.
“We are certified by Organic Farmers and Growers, who audit us every year. We use a small amount of organically-approved fertiliser now as some of our chalk soils are deficient in sulphur, potassium and magnesium.
“Apart from that, most of our nutrition for the soils and crops is via farmyard manure, dairy slurry or occasionally bought-in green compost and, of course, nitrogen from the legumes we grow, which drives our crop yields.
“We also buy in a certain amount of protein and energy feed to give to our high-yielding dairy cows. Any nutrients left over from the milk-producing cow passes through into the manure and is returned back onto the land, so helping to replace nutrients removed from the farm in the milk that is sold.”
Cover crops bring benefits
John plants a range of overwinter cover crops to help improve the soil texture and capture nutrients, particularly nitrogen, from the soil before they get leached out through the winter rainfall. He uses a simple mix such as mustard, fodder radish, rape and buckwheat.
"You can graze them,” he adds, “but they are more designed to improve the soil. They cover the ground and prevent weeds from establishing and the flowers from the mustard and radish provide a useful source of nectar for late feeding insects.
“We grow wheat, barley, oats and mixtures of cereals and pulse crops such as oats and beans or barley and vetch. Our leys are all sown with very diverse seed mixtures. For grazing we will use a mixture of grasses, clovers and herbs such as chicory, plantain and birdsfoot trefoil.
“For silage conservation we will use grass and red clover leys or lucerne mixed with timothy grass. These leys are more resilient in times of drought as roots of plants like lucerne, red clover and herbs go much deeper and draw up water and nutrients from much lower down the soil profile.”
John says this is important as they often have quite dry summers in the south east. Much of the farm is too steep to plough, so they have over 200 acres of very low input permanent grassland, which is mainly used for grazing the dairy youngstock.
“This way of farming is definitely encouraging more wildlife onto the farm, especially birdlife, partly because we are no longer spraying and also because of the diversity of plants growing across the farm, including some traditional arable weeds such as cornflower and poppies,” he says.
"We get lots of skylarks, yellowhammers and many other common small birds as well as a number of red and amber listed birds such as marsh tit, linnet, mistle thrush, dunnock, and whinchat.”
Managing the hedgerows
John says they are starting to manage the hedgerows, but it’s something that takes time. “They aren’t great on the farm and were pretty decimated after the war. They weren’t considered important then. That has completely changed” he says.
“We are keen to have a look at the new SFI (Sustainable Farming Incentive) to see what that will involve. We are currently in a Countryside Stewardship scheme, which has been extended for another year. This covers things like field margins around the arable fields, which are clearly beneficial because we see barn owls hunting over them for voles.
"Wild bird seed mix plots provide feed for seed-eating birds during the winter. Overwinter cover crops are also part of the scheme and that’s brilliant for us as it fits in with what we already do organically.”
John also owns a couple of small parcels of land that was once Glebe land. One of these fields he has taken out of farm production and used to offer nitrate mitigation credits to housing developers.
This has given him an opportunity to raise some extra capital to re-invest in the farm to help future-proof the farm business, at the same time as effectively rewilding this piece of land for the benefit of wildlife.
Diversity is key both for the environment and the farm. John says it’s important to have robust rotations with good mixes of crop species that work well in an organic system.
He says: “I love this way of farming as long as it is profitable. I feel much more in control because I’m not being dictated to about what chemical to apply to control this or that pest, disease or weed.
“We rely on a sound rotation and nature to deal with any agronomic issues and still get respectable crop yields. The cows love the diverse leys they are grazing, which means happy healthy cows and great quality milk. It’s a great way to farm.”