Farmer focus contributor appearing in 4 issues from Issue 22 (July 2023) onwards.
Appearances
Issues 22, 23, 25, 27
[Sources: dd-issue-22 through dd-issue-27]
Issue 22 — Last BPS, First Marketing Plan (July 2023)
Thomas’s debut Farmer Focus, written immediately after completing his last-ever BPS application — a moment that prompted a wide-ranging look at how to keep his 800 ha South Lincolnshire farm financially stable as the era of “money for owning land” closes.
15 years into direct drilling — the cost case
The farm’s transition to direct drilling came around 15 years earlier when traditional machinery was at the end of its useful life — Thomas’s grandad had seen the technique in Argentina, and the family chose it over re-investing in heavy cultivation kit. A recent benchmarking exercise comparing Thomas’s three-year average winter wheat performance against neighbours:
- Yield and income: virtually identical to conventional neighbours
- Variable costs: ~17% below average
- Fixed costs: ~40% below average
Wheat N has come down from ~200 kg/ha to ~160 kg/ha while maintaining 9–10 t/ha. The next 10% of cost reduction is the harder bit — and Thomas thinks it requires “more radical thinking, probably with the use of legume leys or ideally a permanent understorey”.
The income-side pivot
Pulled by a Sustain report — Unpicking food prices: where does your food pound go, and why do farmers get so little? — that found a cereal farmer “spends 9.03p yet receives an almost negligible profit (0.09p) on a selling price of £1.14”; for four beefburgers the processor gains ten times the profit of the beef farmer. Thomas asks whether it might be easier to lift the income side rather than push down costs further.
Gentle Farming
He has launched Gentle Farming — gentle-farming.co.uk — as a brand for the regen practices on his own farm. The intent is not a farm shop:
“How can I shift thousands of tonnes through a farm shop? No, the real question is can I leverage my regenerative farming techniques to gain premiums in the market? YES is the answer! But we need to do something we have traditionally not been great at — ‘Marketing’.”
He has been hosting farm tours with some of the biggest food companies in the country, hoping to shortcut the supply chain and sell more directly at scale. Slowly making progress; “I am looking forward to the day sometime soon when I can walk into a restaurant knowing my crop which I grew is being sold at scale to real people.”
The rotation now includes wheat, oats, OSR (decreasingly), field beans, plus British Quinoa company contracts, forage rye and grass for a local AD plant — all part of the same shorten-the-supply-chain approach.
[Source: dd-issue-22, 2026-04-13]