“My role here is to look after the land. My aim really is to be a carbon negative farmer.” Tim Williams is a young farmer, based at English Farm, near Reading. He spent many years farming in New Zealand’s more intensive systems before moving here to find ways of farming that regenerate soils and mitigate climate change rather than add to it. Tim took on the ultimate challenge of working with cows to achieve this, now demonised by many as a key cause of greenhouse gases, but Tim has also seen the positive benefits as the once arable land is beginning to transform. He is using a mixture of grazing and herbal leys to return the whole farm to healthy permanent pasture.
Tim has only been at English Farm one year running the herd of 28 English Longhorn cows. With their horns the animals look so majestic munching through the green pastures. The cows live outside all year round, so it’s important there is plenty of shelter in the fields and of course enough grass to last through the Winter. Tim does supplement with a bit of hay in the coldest, darkest days, just to make sure they are all happy.
Tim has realised that to reach his goals he needs to understand and monitor the health of his soils and pasture. So when we turned up in November to get him setup he had already prepared an outline of the fields he wanted to watch, some that ‘had never done well’ and some that were the best fields on the farm. He wanted to know why was one field better than the other, maybe the answers lay in the soil? And could he improve the quality of the field through how he managed his animals?
On arrival he showed us a soils report he had done of the farm when he arrived a year ago. “I didn’t know anything about the land and needed to know if I could make a low-input system work here, so I had a professional soils assessment done. They came and spent a day taking readings and then they sent me a report which basically advised me where to put Lime to balance the pH of the fields. It was dealing with patching up symptoms not long-term solutions, so I put it on my shelf and haven’t looked at it since.”
After going out and doing above and below ground assessments across multiple fields we bundled back into the truck and headed home as darkness descended. Back at the office with a warm tea Tim told us, ‘Even just going out there today I have learnt more about my soils than I did from that expensive report. I’m very excited to be part of this project and better understand my soils, plants and animals so I can make the farm here a carbon-negative success.’’
What are Tim’s management objectives?
- Take it up to 40 cows from 28 cows.
- Improve carbon holding of the soils. Is this farm carbon positive or carbon negative?
- Continue to run a low-input system on the 200 acres
How will Tim judge those?
- Total live weight gain
- Amount of soil with living plants in
- Possibly compare the Brix morning and Brix evening
- Improvement in Soil Structure
What is Tim measuring?
- % of undesirables, bare soil
- % of grasses, broadleaves, no. of species of each
- brix % & fuzziness
- plate meter/sward stick (Dry Matter/ha)
- VESS (1-5)
- earthworm count
- total approx weight of animals on each field
Find Tim on instagram @EnglishFarm_
Interested in using Soilmentor to monitor soil health and manage your farm both above and below ground?
