Strengthen soils for improved farm productivity

When we took this farm on in 2007, it soon became quite apparent that these very fertile thin soils are prone to wind erosion. My wife and I both trained as soil scientists and to watch soil erosion from wind was just unacceptable and it's our most precious resource, so we started to think about ways we could address the issue of soil erosion, but in a way that fitted around our farming system and still provided us income.

So having had some exposure to agroforestry when I was working in Africa many years ago, we started to think how we might be able to apply that to a UK context. It ticked many of the boxes that we were looking to try and achieve in terms of increasing productivity, increasing biodiversity, protecting the soil from wind erosion and fitting around our sort of arable farming system.

We needed to pick a tree species which gave us an economic return within the 15 years of our tenancy, so that rather ruled out long-term hardwoods like let's say walnut. Apples fitted the bill in terms of timescale and they also provided us with a quick return crop for a tree and something we can add value to. Productivity from the tree crops is generally about the same as we get from the field crops on a per unit area basis, although I can add a lot more value to apples and fruit than I can to cereals so potentially there's more economic gain.

But what we have seen is a massive change in biodiversity, there's been a number of studies, PhD and MSc studies, on the farm which have shown increased levels of biodiversity, increased levels of spatial diversity of insects and you know to us, pollinators are hugely important and increasing the number of pollinators and increasing habitat for them I think is hugely important for agriculture.

Soil is our most precious resource and levels of organic matter have been declining for 70 or 80 years. They're bottoming out and it's the carbon that's in that soil organic matter that's actually fuelling the agricultural system. The beauty of an agroforestry system is that you're gaining carbon at times of the year like today, where we're in the end of September, all the field crops are harvested yet the trees have still got leaf on they're still photosynthesising, they're still bringing in carbon to the system, they're still providing deep roots.

The other bit that really attracted me was that you know, often we hear that there is no more land, but there's a lot more space if we start to think about farming in a three-dimensional way by actually using the space above the ground and actually below the soil in a more imaginative way. That's what we're trying to achieve with agroforestry. We're farming up and we're farming down as well as farming across the landscape in a linear fashion.

One of the positive aspects of agroforestry is we're mixing perennial crops with annual crops. So in a more unpredictable climate, when we don't know if we're going to get extreme periods of drought or extreme periods of wet as we've seen in the last few years, we're mitigating that risk by having a mixture of perennial crops and annual crops, whereby the perennial crops don't have to start from scratch each year. So for me it's a sort of climate-smart approach to trying to mitigate those risks.

Often people look at the agroforestry system we've got and they think we're taking land out of production into trees. I would say it’s the reverse. We're actually trying to make the farm more intensive and we're doing that by trying to capture more carbon and actually use more of the soil below the surface and more of the space above the ground and try and be more productive. It's just two different types of production, but what it does do is bring resilience to the farm in terms of climate change, it reduces issues in relation to soil degradation, it adds biodiversity to the farm and also spreads labour. So we’ve finished cereal harvest, we're waiting to start next year's cultivations and drilling, but we're also onto our second harvest, so we're getting two harvests from one field. You could say in a field of wheat with apples, it’s actually apple pie all in one field.