Farmer focus contributor appearing in 3 issues from Issue 20 (January 2023) onwards.
Appearances
Issues 20, 25, 27
[Sources: dd-issue-20 through dd-issue-27]
Issue 20 — A Mixed Herefordshire Farm With the Pieces in Place (January 2023)
Billy’s debut Farmer Focus, framed as an introduction to his 140 ha home farm + 60 ha share-farming arrangement in Herefordshire — arable, pedigree Hereford cattle and a sheep flock, all roughly equal in their share of farm income.
Permanent pasture, herbal leys and a 3+3 cycle
Half the farm is permanent pasture receiving no inputs at all — no fertiliser, no lime, no metal through the ground. The arable half runs a three-years cereals + three-years diverse clover or herbal ley cycle. A new share-farming arrangement on a local farm includes a livestock-excluded experimental block that uses green-manure mulching, pulses in the rotation and chopped straw to maintain fertility — Billy already has “a suspicion which area will perform best”.
Compounding the pieces
The integration of livestock and arable is the centre of his system:
- Sheep are 48-hour paddock-moved on ewe-and-lamb paddocks at 300 head/acre at peak growth — entering covers at 3,500 kg DM/ha, leaving at 2,000 kg DM/ha, ~30 day rest
- Cattle on permanent pasture with longer rest and higher residuals
- The three-year ley break dramatically reduces parasitic worm burden, allowing Billy to “drastically reduce our use of anthelmintics across the farm”
A 10.1 t/ha clover-living-mulch wheat — vs 8.2 t/ha conventional next door
The headline result. Costello winter wheat direct drilled into a sprayed-down white clover sward (with glyphosate + fulvic + citric acid taking the grass but leaving the clover) yielded 10.1 t/ha on 60 kg N/ha and one fungicide application. Just over the hedge in the last conventionally-managed field on the farm, the same Costello on 125 kg N/ha plus a much more rigorous spray programme yielded 8.2 t/ha. The difference: the higher-yielding field followed a three-year zero-input herbal ley mob-grazed with sheep.
Composted FYM
A second-hand compost turner — “essentially a massive cork screw” — lets Billy turn the farm’s 500 t of annual FYM 4–6 times over two months into a much more biologically active product. Goal: completely eliminate fertiliser across the whole farm in the next 5–10 years while still hitting 9–10 t/ha wheat yields.
“What has surprised me over the past couple of years is how quickly soil health and pasture quality have been changing on the farm. Needless to say, we still have things to improve and a lot of work to do. That puzzle is still far from complete!”
[Source: dd-issue-20, 2026-04-13]