Each day included lunch, a tour of the host farm and access to leading industry speakers.
Pollybell Farm
The first visit was to Pollybell Farm in Doncaster where AHDB presented two sessions. Joe Martin covered the AHDB weed review and bio pesticides conducted under SCEPTREplus (a project designed to respond to emerging and longer term crop protection issues) and AMBER (a project which aims to identify practical ways for growers to improve the performance of biopesticides in their crop protection programmes). Cathryn Lambourne spoke about IPM approaches and an overview of AHDB soils work.
Farm director John Taylor then took us through the work on the 5,000 acre site, which grows a range of horticultural and cereal crops. It’s a challenging undertaking, with varied soil types, peat, sand and clay, as well as wind issues on this exposed site. The farm also manages dairy and livestock as part of the organic rotation system. Pollybell’s make extensive use of automation to check crop progress and manage weeds. It was an informative session especially for those farmers in the audience who are about to complete conversion, or who were considering conversion.
Sandringham Estate
On 14 June we visited Sandringham Estate. The day kicked off with guest speaker Claire Robinson, the NFU's senior countryside adviser, who presented an update on the Environmental Land Management scheme which will replace the Basic Payment Scheme and Countryside Stewardship Scheme under the new Agriculture Bill. Claire was followed by one of the co-founders of Hodmedods, Josiah Meldrum who spoke about the journey and successes of Hodmedods. The products such as fava beans and roasted peas went down a treat!
Keith Banham, Sandringham farm manager then took us around his farm, which was first converted 20 years ago. Now the largest organic farm in Europe, Keith produces wheat, rye, peas and apples to name a few.
Strickley Farm
Our final visit was to Strickley Farm in Cumbria. The theme for the visit was education and engaging the next generation. After a talk from head of membership at OMSCO Peter Bennet about the dairy co-operative, NFU north west regional communications adviser Carl Hudspith updated the audience with the work in the north west and how farmers can get more involved in the NFU and education.
Jennie Devine from the NFU's education team talked about NFU schools competition Farmvention to design a farm invention and STEMterprise which are projects available to primary school teachers to get children more involved in farming and understanding the origin of their food.
In the afternoon farm owner James Robinson took us on a tour around his 300 acre shorthorn dairy farm. James has 25 school visits a year and takes part in ‘Facetime a farmer’. His presence on Twitter has helped to increase communication about farming with the next generation. See James’s Twitter profile here.
All three farm visits were well attended by organic and non-organic farmers, with every farmer having an inspiring story to tell.
The NFU Organic Forum wants to build relations between organic and non-organic farming and believe these farm open days provide a great opportunity for farmers to learn and share knowledge.
If you missed out on our events this year, look out for more farm visits coming 2020.