Mill Barton farm walk
A late winter view of a farm as it transitions from a high input to low input system.
Pasture for Life’s southwest team and members met at Mill Barton Farm in North Devon on Tuesday 14th March for a farm walk and discussion on transitioning from a high input to low input farm system.
Firstly we were blessed with one of those March days which is so warm and sunny that you could almost feel the plants underfoot pushing up. No icy wind or driving rain, no sleet, just warm sun on our faces!
Bella and Toby welcomed us to their new studio/office, from which they run Digg and co, a landscape architect consultancy, we had a coffee and listened to their presentation about their land. The way the farm had historically been over fertilised and over worked and how they are bringing it back to a better balance.
We were treated to lovely food, cooked by Toby. Their own beef and locally farmed potatoes. The food and conversation was so good we almost forgot to go on our walk, which would have been a pity as Bella and Toby shared so much information while we walked their land.
We saw leaky dams and newly dug ponds holding as much water as possible on the farm, to reduce mains water usage as well as cleaning any run off. We saw culm grassland restoration, woodland planting and management, and how their species rich fields differed from their historically overly fertilised land (including a disturbing algae filled pond that takes the run off from a field so full of years of piped in turkey slurry it’s not ‘clean’ even after 5 years of no inputs).
We walked and talked and scattered culm land restoration seeds taken from a large biscuit tin Toby carried. We over ran our finish time, but somehow, in the spring sun, full of good food and happily sharing information it didn’t seem to matter.
The takeaway messages from the day were hopeful, that degraded soil can be restored, that water can be cleaned by simple interventions, that the complexity found in nature based farming is a really powerful thing, that chatting ideas over helps you make plans, and that pasture for life beef is tasty!
We will be hosting a larger summer gathering at Mill Barton in the summer, so we can do it all again!
