September 2024
Alice and my pre harvest holiday was with Wild With Consent whose website promises ‘This is wild camping, but not as you know it’. I have always asked for Alice’s consent before going wild otherwise she would have me arrested. What the website actually meant that we could camp in a remote place on somebody’s farm without the landowner showering us with some animal’s excrement. It is that kind of consent.
If was also a fact-finding mission. We have just placed a pitch on our own farm on the Wild With Consent website and so we wanted to check what other farmers were offering to make sure that our Shimpling pitch was up to scratch.
The deal is that once booked you get a What Three Words reference giving you the exact pitch location, personally checked by the Company’s owner to be wild enough, and all you have to do is make sure that you leave no trace of human presence when you vacate your allotted spot.
Not being a natural camper I immediately took to the World Wide Web to find a huge fridge to cool alcoholic beverages and bacon, a mattress that would self-inflate before I had reached the top of our roof top tent’s stairs and a power input to ensure that communication with humanity could be accessed at all times. Because Alice had said that it was illegal for me to dig a hole to naturally fertilise the periphery of our remote home, I spent an inordinate amount of time researching a natural portable loo, as being of the organic persuasion it is against my principles to sit astride the chemical version. Huge success in that department. All I can tell you is that it involved a tripod, a biodegradable plastic bag and copious amounts of sawdust. It was a triumph.
Alice did say that with all the money I had spent on “stuff” it would have been cheaper to stay in a five-star hotel. “But this will be fun” I said. I can’t remember exactly what she replied but I’m pretty sure it involved a sharp implement and me tackling a piece of gymnasium equipment.
Our destination was the Lake District but also to cram in as many locations as possible over the six days we were away to fulfil the research element of the holiday.
Dreadful planning on my part meant that night one (Leicestershire) was the evening of the World Cup final. Fortuitously during my spending spree in the quest for camping comfort I had purchased a dongle with unlimited data. With the roof tent erected, awning splayed, chairs and tables positioned, iPad streaming that fated game and with views over the verdant Cottesmore Country, Alice began to warm to the situation. However, my pièce de résistance was producing some fizzy wine, chilled by the aforementioned fridge, which seemed to cheer her up no end.
I’m not going to lie, the first two nights were a little grizzly as we acclimatised to a sheet of canvas between us and the outside world, negotiating the roof top tent’s ladder at 3am in the morning to answer the call of nature without falling out of said tent like a sack of potatoes and the fact that because most of the locations were so wild that there was no phone signal. But by the third night we got into a routine and went slightly native on the whole camping thing. With all devices severed from the outside world we also discovered the art of speech and found out that even after nearly thirty years of marriage we still actually quite liked each other. Oh, and books made out of paper, you should try one, the battery life is amazing.
Following Leicestershire, we had three nights in Cumbria and on the way home a night in Yorkshire. We ended up by loving the whole experience. Wild With Consent, you have to try them and suggest a pitch on your own farm so that we can come and see you too.
You are probably wondering where all this is going. He hasn’t mentioned a direct drill yet which I fully intend to but first I do want to tell you about two things that happened in the Lake District.
Firstly, Alice and I spend a day’s walking up to Angle Tarn and experienced the most amount of weather I have ever been exposed to in my life. Being north of Suffolk I assumed that no sun cream would be necessary on my bald head during the trek, but I was wrong. I don’t care what the boffins tell you, they do have that fiery ball north of Preston so much so that I had to bathe my bald head in the tarn to cool my third-degree burns. Then in a flash the weather gods threw hail stones at us like cricket balls, we were lucky to get away with mild concussion. Quite what farmers up there know what to put on in the morning is a mystery to me. Flat cap or a hard hat? String vest or Sou’wester? Tricky. I’ll never complain about our Suffolk weather again. Also the Cumbrian landscape goes up and down a lot which meant that our under-developed East Anglian calves screamed in pain on the way up and then on the way down we discovered that we had no actual muscles around our knees. Our biggest climb in Shimpling is upstairs to bed.
The second thing I want to tell you about while lakeside is a conversation I had with the famous organic Cumbrian farming influencer, James Robinson or as we Twitter (X) fans know him @JRfromStrickley.
James and I have bumped into each other at various organic and regenerative events over the years, but I felt that I had never really sat down and chewed the cud with him, and since we were in the area it seemed rude not to meet up.
Having just been to Groundswell and then the National Organic Crops event I was curious to know what Jame’s take was on the rise of regenerative agriculture and he said a really interesting thing. In the context of organic verses regenerative farming he said, “I think that the ambition of regenerative farming is limitless”. I was sort of taken aback as to me his statement suggested complacency in the organic sector.
The main thrust of James’s point was that organic certification took us to a certain point in terms of it’s standards but once you had achieved those standards that was it. Job done. Sure, there are lots of practices in those standards that align and go further than regenerative farming principles but the ambition stops once they are met.
I began to think about my recent organic inspection. Part of the annual routine is a drive around the farm checking that I have done what I have said I have done. Does it look like we have been spraying any pesticides? Have we got sufficient physical barriers between us and our neighbours to reduce the risk of spray drift? Samples are taken of forage, grain and soil and sent off for analysis to check if we are lying. The inspection feels like a test. It should be a celebration.
Soil is checked traces of pesticide and not soil health or any increase of organic matter. Tillage methods go unquestioned. A sustainable rotation has to be demonstrated but it’s requirement is pretty basic. Bi-cropping or any multi-species cropping is not a thing. No mention of the use of cover crops or to keep the soil covered. Other than complying with the rules there is no expectation of agroecological progression. No ambition. And it’s possibly why you do come across some organic farms that don’t look very “organic”.
Well reader, you will be happy to know we are doing all of the above at Shimpling Park Farm even though our inspection doesn’t document it and that takes me to the final point that James made. “We have to go beyond organic”. I’ve been to James’s farm and he certainly does.
I want our inspection day to be one of celebration. Smelling healthy soils rather than packaging samples for testing. Walking in our crops to witness food and nature in the same place rather than focusing on segregation. Recording innovation within our rotation rather than ticking a box to demonstrate adherence to basic agronomy.
In my previous December submission, I argued the validity of organic standards verses regenerative principles, but we do have to be honest about where just achieving the organic standard is limiting best practice.
We need our farms to feel organic rather that a farm that doesn’t use any pesticides. Equally, our farms must feel genuinely regenerative rather than just a farm with a direct drill.
There, told you I’d mention a direct drill.
