John Cherry — Groundswell Founder, Lannock Manor Farm

Co-founder of the Groundswell Show and Conference show, farming 2,500 acres in Hertfordshire with his brother Paul. 100% no-till since 2010. Featured farmer in Direct Driller Issue 6.

📰 Read articles by John Cherry — Groundswell Founder, Lannock Manor Farm on Direct Driller → View author archive

Profile
Farm Lannock Manor Farm, Hertfordshire
Area 2,500 acres (~2,000 arable + 500 permanent pasture)
No-till since 2010 (100%)
Drill JD 750A (original, bought used)
Livestock Beef Shorthorn cross suckler cows (two mobs), mob-grazed; PFLA member
Inputs stopped No bought P or K for ~10 years; no insecticides for 4–5 years

Journey to No-Till

  • 1970s: watched farm worker ploughing with tiny tractor — “there had to be a better way”
  • 30 years of conventional farming; flirted with min-till and direct drilling when straw could be burned
  • Key influence: Steve Townsend (corrected misconception about surface straw being a problem)
  • Gradually cultivated shallower each year; soil microbes built up, straw disappeared, surface softened
  • Visited Simon Cowell, Tony Reynolds, Simon Chiles — “particularly inspirational”
  • Bought old JD 750A: “The previous twenty five years had been a warm up. That’s also pretty much when my education began”

Key Learning

“Nearly everything I’d learnt before this moment was of no interest or plain wrong.”

  • No mention of soil biology at university — only chemistry and physics
  • Influenced by: Lady Eve Balfour (The Living Soil), Sir Albert Howard (An Agricultural Testament)
  • Online forums (BFF → TFF Direct Drilling section): “I’ve learnt so much more from it than ever I did in three years of reading Agriculture at University”

[Source: dd-issue-06, 2026-04-11]

Current System

Arable

  • Struggling to find a viable broadleaved break crop
  • Growing cover crops wherever room permits
  • Experimenting with companion crops to confuse pests/diseases and feed soil biology

Livestock

  • Gradually increasing beef herd to graze cover crops and incorporate leys into rotation
  • Mob-grazed Beef Shorthorn cross; Hereford and Shorthorn bulls
  • Finished at 24–30 months on grass/silage/hay only — no grain; cheaper, no health problems
  • Part of Pasture Fed Livestock Association (premium market for pasture-fed stock)

Compost

  • Bale ~1/3 of straw; chop the rest
  • Straw + woodchip from local tree surgeons balances N in FYM with carbon
  • Recently purchased compost turner — “everyone has become slightly obsessed about compost making”
  • Added lorry-load of ReMin Scotland volcanic rock dust to compost windrow
  • “The potential is enormous — if we can find safe streams of food waste, it won’t be long before we stop buying any fertiliser”

Input Reduction

  • No bought P or K for ~10 years; indices constant or rising
  • Stopped insecticides 4–5 years ago — occasional BYDV patch, but increased biodiversity (ground beetles controlling slugs) outweighs losses
  • “Above all, we are enjoying ourselves immensely…who knew farming could be such fun?”

[Source: dd-issue-06, 2026-04-11]

Issue 14 — A No-Fungicide Year (July 2021)

A landmark season for Lannock Manor: by the end of May John had not applied a single fungicide to any crop on the farm. Only a couple of fields of Zyatt wheat were due a spray for emerging rust. Credits Tim Parton for showing him how it could be done.

  • The chain of inspirations: Clive Bailye and his agronomist Richard Hammond had previously prompted him to drop insecticides; that worked so well he also dropped slug pellets (ground beetle populations now control slugs)
  • OSR write-off: companion planting with berseem clover, buckwheat and vetch helped get rape away from flea beetle, and the vetch combined with the rape made the operation worthwhile, but yields stayed disappointing — beetles “gnawing away inside the plants”. Done with OSR
  • The fungicide gamble: spraying biological brews supposed to promote plant-friendly fungi and feed nutrition; combine yield meter will reveal results vs untreated misses

On Why He’s Doing This

“It’s always worth remembering that these pathogenic fungi aren’t ‘evil’, they are nature’s way of tidying the place up… Our job as farmers should be to give our crops the best chances in life, so they don’t attract the attention of the clean-up squad.”

  • N use cut to a max of 150 kg/ha on wheats and trending down; some plots with no N at all (yellow but interesting); herbal leys and permanent pastures already running with no N
  • No base P or K for ~15 years; indices stable or rising — clay’s “unavailable” P and K becoming available when fungi are left alone
  • Bird counts excitedly logged: hundreds of yellowhammers, skylarks, corn buntings; swarms of linnets and goldfinches

Honest Bench-Marking

Sits at the bottom of the Groundswell bench-marking group league table (Gary Markham of Land Family Business) — but still profitable and increasingly financially resilient. “All the others in the bench-marking group are even better off. It is a very happy story.”

[Source: dd-issue-14, 2026-04-13]

Issue 18 — The Confessional Farmer Focus (July 2022)

A self-deprecating column written into Groundswell 2022 prep, in which John — co-founder of the show and one of the most senior voices in UK regen ag — uses his Farmer Focus slot to broadcast his own mistakes “to cheer people up” by knowing “there’s someone making bigger mistakes than they are”.

The cover-crop / cold-spring mistake, three years running

“We’ve made variations of the same mistake three years running and we’ve had three cold dry springs in a row. Back of the class for us.”

The mistake: leaving cover crops on too long, thinking “good cover would help dry it out”. It does dry the surface — but also dries the root zone, which then hurts the spring crop.

Wheats then and now

  • 2021’s no-fungicide programme started smug, then “the weather turned a bit rusty, as did the wheat” — and a wheel fell off the sprayer behind a Groundswell-distracted moment. Yields back to 1970s levels but worth a lot.
  • 2022 wheats look good but had a fungicide (“I’m sorry to say”) and look thin in the rows
  • Winter oats messy and knee-high
  • Very little N applied — too dry to spray N on at these prices and watch it evaporate

Cattle saving the day

“The cattle are doing brilliantly though, it looks like they’ll be making more money per acre than the crops. Having herbal leys about the place is joyous enough even before we raise the grubby matter of profit emanating from them. I love the cattle, I love that they are making money, I love what they do to the soil and I love how they make me see ‘farming’ in a different way.”

Groundswell 2022 line-up

  • Dwayne Beck, Jill Clapperton, Greg Judy
  • Henry Dimbleby revisiting the Food Strategy one year on
  • Lennart Olsson from Lund University on the perennial wheat work being done in association with the Land Institute in Kansas — John is hoping a UK institution will pick this up

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

Issue 20 — The Mammoth Millet and a Groundswell Expansion Plan (January 2023)

A wry harvest-and-planning column. The hot dry summer made a quick harvest possible, but the spring crops were disappointing. Several planned spring crops weren’t even drilled because the ground was too dry; Mammoth millet was substituted for linseed on the basis an early June sowing would probably get something out. It did — but only at six inches tall, making combining “interesting”: forty acres in one combine tank.

Mulika spring wheat managed just over a tonne per acre; the spring oats “looked fantastic” but the heat burned them off. A field of grass seed too dirty to make seed grade gave several hundred round bales of hay; fields where cover crops were never sprayed off became welcome silage, with a bit of westerwolds in the mix “paying dividends”.

The five-principles self-audit

Cherry is unusually candid that Lannock Manor falls short of the regen-ag principles on its arable land: “there’s often exposed soil, single species cropping, and the only grazing animals they might encounter are deer and the odd hare.” He’s mulling whether a multi-species grazeable summer cover crop could replace monoculture spring barley/wheat on cold dry springs, ticking all five principles at once and giving him fattening-cattle ground as a bonus. Herbal leys “are even better as you get four years of maximum box ticking for your money”.

Regen definition — deliberate ambiguity

As the next Groundswell approaches (28–29 June 2023), John reflects on the pressure to create a regen-ag accreditation scheme so brands can sell “regeneratively grown” at a premium. He argues strongly against: the strength of the regen movement is its experimental, dip-your-toes-in nature. Organic went the other way with a rulebook — “which works quite well, but it did make for a bit of a ‘them and us’ world, where, for instance, conventional farmers didn’t think of using cover crops as they didn’t think it was relevant or useful for their farms.”

Groundswell X Scotland

Trailing an expansion: after hosting Gabe Brown, Allen Williams and Shane New with a 300-strong UK audience in October (the Understanding Ag team were in Europe for other reasons and took a spare day at Lannock), John felt re-energised to push Groundswell beyond its once-a-year event. A Groundswell X mini-festival in Scotland is in planning for summer 2023, and Nicole Masters will be at the main Groundswell after John attended her two-day course hosted by the Land Gardeners at Althorp.

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

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