David White — Hawk Mill Farms, Cambridgeshire

Featured farmer operating a 160 ha chalk farm on the Cambridgeshire/Newmarket border, three years into direct drilling at the time of Issue 3.

📰 Read articles by David White — Hawk Mill Farms, Cambridgeshire on Direct Driller → View author archive

Profile
Farm Hawk Mill Farms
Location Cambridge/Newmarket border
Area 160 ha
Soils Chalk
Drills Horsch CO4 + John Deere 750A
Direct drilling since ~2015 (3 years before Sept 2018)

Key Observations

“Farming Ugly”

David White embraces the “farming ugly” philosophy — accepting that direct-drilled fields look untidy compared to ploughed land but deliver better results underneath. Crops drilled into trash and stubble look less conventional but soil health and resilience improve.

Drought Resilience (2018)

The 2018 drought provided clear evidence of no-till benefits on chalk soils:

  • No-till land showed greater soil resilience to drought compared to cultivated neighbours
  • Crops held on longer and recovered better from dry spells

Stable Fertiliser Indices

Despite no annual P/K dressing, soil P and K indices remained stable over the three-year no-till period:

[Source: dd-issue-03, 2026-04-11]

Spring 2019 Update (Issue 5)

  • Spring beans and Elyann oats in the ground by 27 February; only spring barley to go (into thick black oats/vetch cover crop for blackgrass fields)
  • Oats drilled into 18″ high desiccated linseed/phacelia cover crop — no wrapping issues on JD 750A milled covering wheels
  • OSR companions: spring beans (inc. some berseem) most successful at reducing CSFB larvae numbers; later-sown no-companion area suffering more from larvae despite emerging after peak flight
  • Nitrogen: OSR and wheat had first N applied but “didn’t look like there was any urgency” — 29 kg N available in 900mm profile; companions and enhanced soil biology contributing
  • Cane molasses added to liquid N+S application at 5 l/ha
  • Nitrogen variation tramline trials set up comparing against a soil-biology-only control
  • Growing own companion seed: winter peas at 100 seeds/m²; vetch with companion spring beans for scaffold
  • Tissue testing started; BASE UK committee member helping plan events including European trip

[Source: dd-issue-05, 2026-04-11]

Issue 13 — Two Drills Versus Big Cover Crops (April 2021)

Five years into regen ag, David’s column wrestles with a very specific machinery problem: how to drill into the big residue-heavy cover crops that farmers like Julien Senez and Frédéric Thomas promote as essential (Senez’s target: 4.5 t biomass covers).

  • Hair-pinning problem: after years of regen, the top 50mm is so soft and residue-rich that it is “too soft to cut against” — a cross-slot-style drill apart, he questions whether anything on the market can cope with peas/vetch laid horizontal under chopped straw
  • Autumn 2020 demo 1 — SimTech T-Sem: the first direct drill he ever tried, five years ago in worse conditions. This time, slim feet gave minimal disturbance and tine vibration shattered enough soil to avoid harrowing. Struggled with extreme vegetation. Score: 8/10
  • Autumn 2020 demo 2 — Virkar from Samagri: leading disc and tine drill; asked onto the same heavy-vegetation field a few days later. Soft soil surface and a shower made the finish “best described as ugly” — but the wheat now looks very well. Score: 8/10
  • Conclusion: “I can’t say I’ve found a single drill to replace the need on this farm for a true disc and a pure tine drill.” Either accept the compromise of less-bulky upright-species covers, or stay with two drills
  • Lesson on the new disc machine experiment: bought a cheap small disc machine last summer to establish catch crops into potential volunteer chits without glyphosate. Used at 55mm deep, it moved more soil than his Horsch CO. By February the moved ground walked wetter than an unmoved control: “Lesson learned, have faith and stick to the plan.”

“I also clearly remember Frédéric Thomas saying when asked at a meeting ‘you can’t have too much vegetation’.”

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

Issue 15 — An Indian Summer Finish to Harvest 2021 (October 2021)

A roundup of harvest 2021 from Hawk Mill on the East Anglian clay, finally finishing on 2 September after several rain-checked attempts on the spring beans and cover-crop seed plots — only for an Indian Summer to start the moment the combine stopped.

“Boats” intercrop trial

A spring beans + oats (“Boats”) mix was the headline trial of the season. Calculated the proportions in the sample for a gross margin: a “good break-crop GM” with very few inputs and zero applied N. Land use efficiency stacked up well; carbon footprint very low.

Caveat: it took David nearly two days to separate the field crop with his late-1950s dresser — a cost not in the GM. Crop came to harvest evenly, oats around 16% and beans 18%.

Findings:

  • Adding oats for IWC reduces bean vigour and yield where the oats are sprayed out
  • The mono-spring-bean control plot delivered a smaller GM than the Boats plot — so something to take forward
  • Fewer Bruchid holes this year — possibly the oats, possibly the season
  • Open questions: would a central store ever take and handle a crop like this? Where is the national driver to trial such crops?

Straw volume problem

Cereal straw volumes were so high — slow growth in a frosty April followed by an over-compensating May — that even with a long stubble the tine drill couldn’t flow it. Baler contractors cleared the straw efficiently when weather allowed.

“Combining is the first seedbed operation and you’re not a good combine driver until you’ve driven a baler. Combine turning technique can make for a very tidy or untidy baling job!”

“Five-minute fallow” observation

Once the combine has cut and the straw cleared, the ground dries surprisingly quickly. The five-minute fallow window in a dry year holds real value.

CSFB monitoring with NIAB

Hosting CSFB monitoring traps for Colin Peters of NIAB to map the complete life cycle of the pest from autumn through to spring across the 2021 OSR area.

Lessons reinforced

  • Spring drilling: patience is key; if the ground is still slotty after drilling, a tickle a few days later helps emergence
  • Having both disc and tine drills is invaluable
  • Second wheat is the driver of increasing blackgrass numbers
  • “Second anything isn’t a good idea — a diverse rotation is everything; look beyond a one-year opportunity bonus driven by prices”
  • Don’t underestimate the value of leaving seeds on the surface rather than mixing them in
  • Crop residue management is everything

Variety / dressing decisions

Big reduction in wheat area in favour of spring barley and oats. 3-way blend wheat seed sample sent to NIAB for germination, vigour and disease assessment, with a view to drilling naked seed. Local independent seed merchant happy to supply undressed wheat — “pleasing”.

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

Issue 19 — Transition Experiences at Groundswell (October 2022)

David appears alongside Peter Cartwright (Revesby Estate) and George Fraser (A&R Fraser) in an Agrii Green Horizons feature reporting back from a packed Groundswell seminar on regenerative transitions. He frames his approach in terms his fellow no-tillers will recognise — and adds a few new lines about what the seven-year journey has actually taught him.

Family as the principal stakeholder

David’s switch from full to no-till in a single bold step in 2015 was driven by his determination to “wean himself off the comfort blanket of cultivation as soon as possible”. On 160 ha of mostly light land at Hawk Mill Farm just east of Cambridge, the principal stakeholders are his family.

“Farming ugly” with a thicker skin

“In stepping up our soil biology to reduce our reliance on inputs our shoulders have had to be broad enough to take a good amount of criticism for farming ugly. We have made our fair share of mistakes along the way. Not least by failing to follow the biological rules and trying to do the same thing twice — like growing wheat after wheat.”

The bi-crop story

The headline result he chose to share at Groundswell was the spring oats + spring beans bi-crop trialled the previous year. The two species “complemented each other extremely well”, performed handsomely with no in-crop herbicides, fungicides or fertiliser at all, and generated a much higher margin than the traditional bean crop he grew alongside it.

The system effects

  • Both shallow-working and deep-burrowing earthworm numbers built up rapidly
  • Higher seed rates and better soil structure now allow him to use crop competition in place of herbicides to deal with weeds
  • Tractors run for around a quarter of the time they used to, and at least halve diesel use
  • Soils far more resilient to drought and to heavy rainfall
  • “The amount and diversity of wildlife we have on the farm these days is a joy to see”

[Source: dd-issue-19, 2026-04-13]

Issue 21 — Going Wild (April 2023)

A Farmer Focus dominated by David’s first season inside the Wildfarmed community. Plus an unusual confession.

Drill setup notes

A new set of Dutch 2″ tips on the CO4 (the first set wore unevenly enough to cause depth variation across the drill); two seasons in with the Avatar; a continuing wish for a low-rate companion-bean rotor option from Horsch (“could the clever people at Horsch design one?”); and continued frustration that drill blockage sensors are “sooo expensive”.

The bi-crop and companion crop result

Following his first successful winter Wildfarmed-style bi-crop of Mascani oats with Tundra beans (replicating the Issue 19 spring-oats/beans success), David is bullish: “I see a big future for both bi-crops and companions grown with cereals in making our rotation and production more regenerative”. But the on-farm seed cleaning bottleneck is the constraint — the latest grant round disappointingly funds new direct drills rather than mobile cleaners. He’s now part of starting a local cluster group to fund a group mobile cleaner, and is in conversation with McArthur Agriculture about a higher-spec mobile cleaner that can produce two clean grain fractions.

Going Wildfarmed

6 ha of Wildfarmed spring milling wheat blend planted, with two more 6 ha areas planned to form a new rotation. The motivations:

  1. The Wildfarmed standards stipulate no “cides” — David will have to learn to grow without glyphosate
  2. Companion and bi-cropping is encouraged; the crop can be delivered entire and unsorted
  3. He’ll be supplying a recognised supply chain that pays a premium and lets him buy the bread in the shops
  4. Other than seed, the spend is minimal

The cultivation confession

“Confession time. More or less for the first time in seven years I’ve done a little bit of cultivating, non-yey.”

A Horsch Cultro crimper demo combined with a -10°C frost killed the cover crop — but some grass weeds remained, and David ran a light disc machine through them in the frost, then put the companion beans in with the tine drill, then disc-drilled the wheat through the result. He frames it half-defensively: in a low-N regen rotation, “a few grass weeds” may not have been the problem they would be in a 240 kg N system. He left a true DD control strip to find out.

Looking ahead under the Wildfarmed standards

Already thinking about under-sowing in the spring barley and which frost-intolerant cover crop species will fit a glyphosate-free rotation. “Will I need sheep? double non-yey!”

[Source: dd-issue-21, 2026-04-13]

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