John Pawsey — Shimpling Park Farm, Suffolk

Fourth-generation Suffolk farmer who converted to organic in 1999 and developed a CTF system, demonstrating that organic arable farming can be financially competitive and ecologically transformative. Featured via Agricology in Direct Driller Issue 8.

📰 Read articles by John Pawsey — Shimpling Park Farm, Suffolk on Direct Driller → View author archive

Profile
Farm Shimpling Park Farm
Location Suffolk
Area 649 ha (own) + 650 ha contract farming (30% expansion in 18 months)
Soils Hanslope clay
System Organic (certified since 1999; full farm since 2007)
Livestock 500 New Zealand Romney sheep (closed flock; target 1,000 breeding ewes)
CTF 8.8m system (Tim Chamen/CTF Europe inspiration)
Rainfall 622mm

Soil Organic Matter Journey

Year SOM %
1999 (pre-conversion) 2.9%
2020 (current) 5.5%

[Source: dd-issue-08, 2026-04-11]

Rotation and Crops

  • 2-year grass/clover ley → winter wheat → triticale → winter beans → spring barley (undersown with ley)
  • All crops grown for specific markets: organic wheat/barley/beans for British Quality Pigs (Waitrose Duchy Original); organic oats for White Oats; spelt for Sharpham Park; quinoa for British Quinoa Company
  • On-farm flour mill selling to local bakers
  • “We never put a crop in the ground without securing a market for it”

Controlled Traffic Farming

  • 8.8m system — all implements fit same track width (except combine, being resolved)
  • Benefits already visible: more even crop growth, deeper rooting, better water infiltration, more earthworms
  • Untracked soil treated like a bed — never driven on

Livestock Reintroduction

  • Stockless for 15+ years before buying 250 NZ Romney ewe lambs in 2014 (+250 in 2015)
  • Closed flock; all lamb outside; pasture-fed (occasional haylage/oats supplement, all home-grown)
  • Motivation: close the nutrient gap previously filled by importing manures and green waste
  • Sold locally and through Organic Livestock Marketing Co-Operative

Environmental and Biodiversity

  • Countryside Stewardship scheme (to 2023): landscape restoration, farmland birds, education
  • 40 ha pollen/nectar mixes + 10 ha wild bird seed annually
  • 25+ school visits per year
  • 17-year bird survey: “organic management appears to favour and encourage a stronger farmland bird community”
  • Restored ponds, medieval moated sites; replanted hedges; coppiced ancient woodland
  • PV array on grain store; two woodchip boilers from farm coppice

[Source: dd-issue-08, 2026-04-11]

Issue 13 — The Living Mulch Strip-Till Gambit (April 2021)

Two years into under-sowing a Cotswold Seeds Aber Ace / Aber Herald white clover living mulch at 7.5 kg/ha, John is designing a custom strip-till cultivator to let organic no-till actually work at Shimpling Park. The piece opens by bluntly challenging the no-till purists: “in the absence of pesticides and chemical fertilisers, some form of tillage is needed to feed and weed crops.”

  • Two years’ confidence: the cash crop has out-competed the mulch so far; the mix will do its intended job but he wants to stay simple before adding species
  • The eastern-counties clover problem: 20+ years of undersowing leys tells him clover takes a “huge amount of water” out of drier East Anglian soils; containment is essential — “we will have to contain the clover to lessen that effect”
  • The plan: System Cameleon sows 200mm clover bands between 120mm crop bands. Wants to strip-till those 120mm stubble rows at 40–60mm depth to break lateral clover roots, weed the crop row, and mineralise a pulse of nutrients — tilling only 38% of the ground
  • No machine exists: searched globally for a strip-till at 320mm centres / 120mm width; all available machines are maize/beet-scale at 450–500mm. Now working with a Dutch weeding-equipment specialist to build a nine-metre 28-unit machine to his CTF spec, to trial this autumn
  • The bigger prize: if it works, sees potential to throw the set rotation out entirely — “If we are building fertility annually within a cropping system… will we actually need a dedicated fertility building period or even a break crop?”
  • NZ Romney flock would graze the autumn-drilled crops and mulch over winter — “the Golden Hoof”

“Could we be looking at a completely fluid system?”

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

Issue 15 — Post-Harvest Bliss and the Year of the Thistle (October 2021)

September is John’s “favourite month of the year” — the year is wiped clean and he gets another go. This Farmer Focus is a reflection on harvest 2021 and a series of trial reports.

First-ever organic OSR

Harvest 2021 produced the farm’s first OSR crop since converting the last block to organic in 2007. He cheerfully (and inaccurately) claimed the first organic OSR in the UK on Twitter — drawing protest from a group of organic-OSR-growing Scottish farmers — and now confines his boast to “the village of Shimpling, Suffolk”. Yields ~2 t/ha in the better areas, with patches lost to pigeons on a former WW2 runway and to the Berseem clover companion forgetting to be frost-intolerant. The 2022 crop went in mid-August with 7 t/ha digestate from British Sugar and a Kora buckwheat / Tabor Berseem clover companion.

The Newman Turner trial: weeds vs cover crop

A 16 ha field split half-and-half: cover crop of brassicas + clovers vs natural regeneration channelling Newman Turner’s “the weed is your friend” thesis. The natural-regen side produced “a staggeringly impressive range of the thistle and dock family” plus charlock, all on display from the major A road bisecting the farm. Both sides grazed by sheep over winter, lightly cultivated in a February frost, then drilled with spring oats.

The cover-crop half delivered an extra tonne per hectare at harvest. The Newman side delivered “flocks of small brown jobs feasting on thistle seeds” and disappointing combine-tank results. The trial is being repeated at a much larger scale.

A year for the thistle — and Suffolk’s first organic chia

  • Subsoiling appears to reduce thistle numbers (echoing Keith Banham’s Sandringham work)
  • Vetches grown for seed — a Claas Convio Flex header on demo proved revelatory for low-lying crops
  • “Still growing” his first crop of organic chia at the time of writing — planning to claim first-ever in the UK after testing the assertion on Twitter

A small-grain year

Despite a wet winter, late-April frosts and another spring drought, the wheat, barley and oat berries are the boldest John has seen — but small. “There’s nothing impressive about average, but that is the year that we have just had.”

[Source: dd-issue-15, 2026-04-13]

Issue 18 — Wildfarmed, Camelina, Lentils and One Broken Kitchen Chair (July 2022)

A vintage Pawsey column — gossipy, self-deprecating, and packed with his most ambitious cropping mix to date.

Failed organic OSR — and David White as a foil

His second attempt at organic OSR (this time with buckwheat and frost-intolerant Tabor Berseem clover instead of his previous mix) was offered to the flea beetles “for breakfast” and never reached true leaf. A late-autumn visit to David White at Little Wilbraham showed a vigorous flea-beetle-free diverse mix — but the difference is that David can use a “light dose of herbicide” to tickle out the unwanted plants, whereas the organic grower can only plant species the frost will kill. John refers to him affectionately as “all-the-tools-in-the-box David White”. The failed rape was redrilled with vetches.

Wildfarmed for Andy Cato

25 ha of Wildfarmed Grain has gone in for “musician turned farmer Andy Cato”. Pawsey’s account of Cato’s visit to Shimpling is one of the funniest passages of the issue — Alice Pawsey “let herself down” by swooning, Cato broke a kitchen chair by sitting on it (“Andy sat on it”), and Pawsey afterwards travelled to Coleshill with the Cherry brothers (“I rode to Wiltshire with Regenerative Royalty”). He calls Cato’s farm “truly inspiring.”

Cropping for harvest 2022

  • All winter wheat is a 50/50 Extase / Siskin blend
  • All winter beans drilled with the same blend + Vespa as a bicrop; better bean establishment than 2021
  • 25 ha of camelina/lentil bicrop for Josiah Meldrum at Hodmedods (“such a lovely man”) — lentils using camelina as architecture to stop them going flat
  • A second crop of organic chia for Peter Fairs at Fairking on a south-facing slope; if camelina (yellow) and chia (blue) flower together, “I will have sown a massive Ukrainian flag. I will be charging for photos.”
  • Spelt — only Zollernspeltz, “if they try and tempt you to grow spring spelt, cancel your account with them immediately”
  • Millers Choice heritage wheat for visual neighbours-management

Lower-disturbance organic establishment

Spring-sown crops were established after a sheep-grazed green manure followed by three light and shallow passes with a cultivator — “much less soil disturbance than usual. You’d be proud of me.” Inter-row hoeing has been done once across all crops apart from the spelt.

[Source: dd-issue-18, 2026-04-13]

Issue 20 — Succession, Inbox Curators and the Weird Old Bald Man (January 2023)

John’s Christmas-table column — ostensibly about succession rather than direct drilling. At 58, with three young adults aged 19–24, succession conversations at Shimpling Park are no longer optional, and John uses the column to draft ten job titles he wants his children to consider, tuned to the modern diversified farm rather than the 1980s seat-of-the-tractor role he fell into.

The 1980s inheritance

An affectionate nod to when joining a family farm was “considered to be a form of child abuse”. A certain “agricultural establishment in Gloucestershire that laughed in the face of scholastic achievements as long as your cheque didn’t bounce” got him through his own qualifications. His daughter’s reputation: “hermetically sealed inside a luxury tractor cab, blasted with banging tunes,” she once turned around in a field to discover three punctured tyres and an implement wing embedded in the field’s sole Suffolk tree.

The ten new farm jobs

  1. Enlightened Agronomist — “Enlightened agronomists can see though the plastic”
  2. Trial Designer and Data Analyser — for completing experiments with rigour across rotations
  3. Administrator, Book Keeper and Inbox Curator — to free the rest of the team. “No, I don’t want to join your f***ing WhatsApp group!”
  4. Contract Farming Massager — impart more love to the CFA partners, keep them in the loop on trials
  5. A Roboticist — “In a hundred years time I suspect we will just instruct robots, possibly more than one and never check their (vegetable) oil”
  6. Crop Polisher and Value Adder — de-hulling spelt, cleaning seed, bagging units, bi-crop separation
  7. Environmental Designer, Net Zero Minder, Carbon Creditor and Green Washer (four roles the “man in the coloured corduroys” usually does for you)
  8. Website Wizard, Social Media Schmoozer and Brand Manager — Shimpling Park’s website is “horribly old and clunky”. John confesses @ShimplingPark gets far less attention than his @Hanslope Twitter habit
  9. Property Tickler and Asset Sweater — continuing to repurpose redundant farm buildings

The column is formally addressed as a memorandum to his progeny.

“You may be asking yourself at this point what any of this has to do with direct drilling? Absolutely nothing. But succession is something that we all have to grasp and if you are not doing so, then please make a New Year’s resolution to do so.”

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

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