Simon Cowell — Essex No-Till Pioneer

Soil Farmer of the Year 2018 winner. Farms 400 acres of heavy clay in Essex, much below sea level. No-till for 15+ years; no P or K applied for 20+ years. Pioneer of aerobic composting as biological inoculant. One of the most referenced farmers in Direct Driller, appearing as farmer focus or featured in 8+ issues.

📰 Read articles by Simon Cowell — Essex No-Till Pioneer on Direct Driller → View author archive

For detailed compost-making method, see Aerobic Compost Making for Biological Inoculation. For Soil Farmer 2018 context, see Soil Farmers of the Year 2018.

Key Philosophy

“Soil health is so important, and is the overriding factor in all decisions made, much more than financial implications. I am farming for the long term rather than one year at a time.”

“Biological systems are not predictable.”

System Summary

  • No-till since ~2006; 20 years soil improvement focus
  • No P or K fertiliser for 20+ years — soil indices maintained/rising through biology
  • Compost as centrepiece: horse manure + woodchip + garden waste + gypsum; turned to <70°C; matured up to 1 year; applied at 2-4 t/acre as biological inoculant (see Aerobic Compost Making for Biological Inoculation)
  • Mycorrhizal colonisation: up to 80% on wheat (vs typical 30%) — PlantWorks PGPR gave +1.3 t/ha uplift
  • 4-variety wheat mix: Conqueror, Gator, Diego, Panorama; home-saved for 5+ years
  • Lucerne: every field gets a 3-year “holiday” — roots to 45ft; preserved root matrix aids drainage and biology for following crops
  • Fungicide trials: stopped fungicides on some fields — found they were depressing yields

Alternative Crop Nutrition (Issue 7)

Simon’s most detailed article outlined his radical approach:

  • Total soil mineral tests show tonnes of tied-up P, K, Mg and hundreds of kg of trace elements in top 4 inches
  • Roots go to 6ft → multiply top-4-inch nutrients by 10-15× = “unlimited supply”
  • Stimulate soil biology to release locked-up nutrients via molasses, humic/fulvic acids, compost
  • “I do not want my indices above 1; I want all my nutrients tied up in the organic matter or clay where they can’t leach away but are easily available to the crops”
  • Wheat yielding over 10 t/ha without any P/K fertiliser

[Sources: dd-issue-03 through dd-issue-20]

Issue 17 — 20 Years of Organic Matter Tests, and the Wheat Variety Blend (April 2022)

After 20 years of soil-organic-matter testing on the same farm, Simon decided to put 63 individual tests onto a spreadsheet and let Excel draw the trend line.

The 20-year SOM trend

  • Individual annual results “fluctuate up and down over quite a wide range” — Simon is forthright about the inaccuracies of grams-from-tonnes sampling
  • But the trend line shows a definite increase over time
  • Average OM has gone from ~4.4% to over 6% across the 20 years
  • Recent deeper sampling (down to 45 cm) shows a gradual reduction with depth, but even at the deepest depths SOM is still ~4% — strongly suggesting OM is forming throughout the profile, just more slowly with depth

Carbon and the “100 kg of nitrogen” insight

Working from soil bulk density and the C:N of OM:

  • Sequestering “just over one tonne of carbon per hectare” per year
  • At a 10:1 C:N ratio, that’s 100 kg of nitrogen per hectare per year being sequestered into OM
  • Most N requirement calculations assume only 10–20 kg/ha is mineralised
  • His conclusion: regen farmers building OM are immobilising 100 kg N/ha/year — meaning each unit of fertiliser N is effectively growing two crops, the cash crop and the OM
  • “I wouldn’t be surprised if my Nitrogen Use Efficiency is above 100%”

The wheat variety blend, eight years on

After listening to talks by Prof Martin Wolfe and Prof Adrian Newton, Simon went into a four-variety hard feed wheat blend in 2014. With his agronomist’s help he picked four varieties from completely different breeding lines (most modern wheats trace back to Robigus, which made this surprisingly difficult): Conqueror, JB Diego, Panorama and KWS Gator. All four mature within 3–4 days of each other.

The drift over 8 years

He has had several DNA tests done on his home-saved seed:

Variety Original Current ratio
KWS Gator 25% 5%
Panorama 25% 10%
JB Diego 25% 22%
Conqueror 25% 63%

Conqueror has steadily out-yielded the others — Simon now faces the dilemma of whether to let it dominate or refresh diversity by adding new varieties.

Disease, royalties and the seed-merchants’ myth

  • His own 2017/18/19 trials showed the blend was the highest-yielding option every year — has stopped looking at the Recommended List
  • BSPB DNA testing of farm-saved seed showed all four varieties had maintained their purity — no natural crossing
  • “It is generally assumed that farmers who home save need to regularly buy in new first-generation seed… This is clearly not the case and farmers should never feel the need to renew a variety once they have bought their first batch.”

[Source: dd-issue-17, 2026-04-13]

Issue 20 — The Headland Effect and Aerobic No-Till (January 2023)

An unusually diagnostic Farmer Focus. The autumn drilling season was frustrating: soils baked hard and cracked to depth well into October, with small rainfall events drying up before they could trigger germination. Only the land after winter beans and lucerne was just moist enough down to an inch to drill with the Sim-tech around 15 October; the ex-linseed ground was still not drilled as Simon wrote, and likely wouldn’t be.

“Linseed is a fantastic crop for me, I always get the best wheat yields afterwards and it leaves the soil in perfect condition… the only problem is that for the following crop, I have to use my Moore Uni-drill to get through the standing linseed, the tined Sim-tech bungs up within a few yards.”

The headland effect investigation

The core of the column is Simon’s ongoing puzzle over yielding more on the headlands than in the middle of the field — a pattern shared by other longer-term no-tillers he’s spoken to. He had assumed for years this was a biology-from-hedgerows benefit; now, looking at the sharp drop-off parallel to his turning wheel tracks, he believes the cause is mechanical:

“It appears that this no-till soil is becoming too loose, too free draining and too aerobic. It seems to me that the physical is affecting the biological, and therefore there is a difference in the chemical (nutrient availability).”

All his field operations run at different angles (straw-raking 45°, drilling 15° offset, harrowing/rolling 90°), so the headlands receive roughly two or three times the compressions the rest of the field does. He now suspects headlands represent the correct level of soil compression for his system, and the middles are too fluffy.

The investigation

Over summer Simon took soil and tissue samples from obviously good headlands and the main body of fields of wheat and beans. He now has Olsen, Albrecht, La Motte and Total test results, tissue analysis, mycorrhizal colonisation counts and comprehensive soil biology analysis:

  • Phosphate: marked difference on the Olsen tests; other soil tests show same levels across samples
  • Mycorrhizae: no difference
  • Big differences in fungal:bacterial ratios and in protozoa numbers

Simon credits Robert Plumb of Soil Fertility Services for helping organise the testing. More complex biology tests are planned once the soil warms in spring. The implication — that “too aerobic” no-till may be a real phenomenon — is one of the more unexpected findings from a long-term Essex no-tiller in the Direct Driller archive.

[Source: dd-issue-20, 2026-04-13]

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