Tom Sewell — Kent No-Till Farmer

One of Direct Driller’s most prolific farmer focus writers, appearing in 11 issues. Nuffield Scholar who travelled the world studying no-till techniques. Farms with his father in Kent; 100% no-till for 7+ years by Issue 6 (2019). Known for honest, reflective writing on the realities of no-till farming.

📰 Read articles by Tom Sewell — Kent No-Till Farmer on Direct Driller → View author archive

Key Themes Across Issues

  • Nuffield Scholarship: travelled to Paraguay (picked up “Everyone copies and no-one thinks” — a recurring personal mantra) and North Dakota (visited Gabe Brown with Jake Freestone)
  • Straw debate (Issue 3): wrestled with whether to bale straw pre-OSR despite no-baling philosophy; 18 years no P/K in bags; cane molasses with liquid N
  • Blackgrass (Issue 7): ongoing battle — “one of the things I seem to have become good at is establishing a lovely crop of blackgrass”; 12-way cover crop behind wheat before spring barley
  • Gabe Brown influence: “Dirt to Soil” book repeatedly referenced; “without cover crops you’re going to spill the sun”
  • OSR challenges (Issue 5): headlands emerged well but middles struggled; CSFB, slugs, rabbits, pigeons — crop “starting to lose favour”
  • Machinery philosophy: father’s saying “we make money because we don’t spend money”; 3 tractors all 9+ years old, under 10,000 hours between them, all paid for
  • No Sunday working: family rule even at harvest — buys biggest machinery within budget to cover ground in 6-day week
  • Personal reflection (Issue 7): close friend’s death from cancer aged 42 — “suddenly rearranged my priorities”
  • Cover crops: restarted after getting complacent relying on volunteer regrowth; diverse mixes
  • Spring beans: perennial disappointment — “every year I have that ‘what was I thinking planting beans?’ thought process”

[Sources: dd-issue-03 through dd-issue-25]

Issue 12 — Less is More After Harvest 2020 (January 2021)

Writing eight years after his Nuffield selection, Tom reflected on a year of extra land, new drills and the same hard-won conclusions. The business planted 900 acres of wheat into 55 fields using a 4.8m Cross-Slot and a second-hand 4m Horsch Sprinter, drilling into previous stubbles of wheat, barley, OSR, lavender, pear and apple orchard, beans, grass, fallow, spring oats, grain maize and cover crops.

  • Drill-point trial on the Sprinter: 100ha of beans drilled into spring barley stubble with a mix of 1″ Dutch points, Bourgault VOS 19mm and Metcalfe 12mm — “the difference in performance and wear rates was staggering” → drill now fitted with 19mm VOS points throughout
  • The persistent mistake: still occasionally subsoiling or shallow-cultivating, “almost always regret doing so” — best-emerging wheats were direct-drilled into stubble with the Cross-Slot; anything cultivated, scratched, subsoiled or ploughed was “a very distant second”
  • New landlords: farming for 14 separate landowners; ex-orchards needed levelling; compost being brought in from a neighbouring soft-fruit grower (strawberry and raspberry)
  • Re-reading his own Nuffield findings — low-disturbance no-till seeding, retain residues, diverse rotations with spring breaks and legumes, cover crops between cash crops: “Looking back at these simple 4 principles I honestly think they still ring true”

“It’s so easy to think that things must change and evolve but this year the main conclusion for me is ‘Less is more’!!”

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

[Source: dd-issue-12, 2026-04-13]

Issue 14 — Don’t Alienate, and the Stainless Steel Spade (July 2021)

Tom used his column to push back against regen-ag tribalism, using an anonymous father-and-son client he drills spring beans for each year as a counter-example: 2,000 acres of arable, 1,000 ewes, 225–250 suckler cows, 50 acres of grapes, two direct drills, well-maintained but unshowy machinery — no buzzwords, no 15-species covers, just hand-roguable blackgrass and second wheats “as good as anything I’ve seen in years.”

  • On the movement: “we as farmers need to be careful not to come across as superior or somewhat arrogant because we have ‘seen the light’… no two farms, farmers or farming businesses are the same”
  • Home farm: now 1,500 acres for 15 landowners across 10 parishes, 55 fields of wheat; all practical work done by Tom and his father since September; Bateman sprayer the only machine on the field between planting and harvest, supported by a bowser
  • Milestone year: wife turns 40, 20th wedding anniversary, eldest turns 16 — “we farm to live and not live to farm”
  • Kit upgrade of the year: a new stainless-steel spade from the local metal detecting club

“The biggest difference between money and time… you always know how much money you have, but you never know how much time you have.”

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

Issue 16 — Soil Farmer of the Year, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (January 2022)

Tom won the Arable Soil Farmer of the Year 2021 at Groundswell, the latest in a string of awards to come out of his Nuffield-trained, BASE-UK founding-member approach to no-till on Kent’s variable soils. The 1,500-acre business is now spread across 15 landowners in 8 parishes, all consolidated through the cross-slot drill into a single rotation built around worms, chopped straw and horticultural-by-product compost.

The Good

  • A first-time call for harvest help on Twitter pulled in two excellent casual workers (Jonny and Ellie) plus Nick — Jonny did almost all the cover and catch crop drilling and most of the cereal drilling
  • The local “Nutters” peer group continues to deliver value
  • Switched independent agronomist after James Rimmer moved to Norfolk — appointed Edaphos / Mike Harrington for agronomy, soils and nutrition. Hosted an on-farm “brewing day” with Mike Harrington, George Hepburn and Nick Woodyatt of Edaphos
  • Trialling Horsch Avatar and Horizon disc drills for winter beans into wheat stubble — both impressed; the cross-slot is struggling to keep up with expanding contract acreage in a tight window
  • Now collecting compost from a neighbouring soft-fruit farm

The Bad

  • COVID — caught it together with his wife. Four weeks later he still couldn’t smell anything
  • A dull, overcast summer never delivered the promise of May. Cut hardly any crops dry; quality held up but Weald Granary co-op took the damp tonnage
  • Wet straw didn’t break down properly, leading to high autumn slug pressure and patchy cover crops despite 65 mm of rain after drilling

The Ugly

“Drilling beans with a no-till drill in late November into sticky clay is not the most enjoyable job and I look forward to unblocking the press wheels on the back of the cross slot as much as a Red Tractor audit!!”

A bigger drill would have allowed an October bean drilling.

Soil Farmer of the Year metrics on the farm walk

  • Approximately 12 million worms per hectare on average
  • Compost from spent strawberry/raspberry plants applied to all newly acquired land
  • Nitrogen reduced 10% per year for the last three years
  • “We maintain the good structure by not ploughing and instead using our worms”

[Source: dd-issue-16, 2026-04-13]

Issue 18 — Staying Sane in a Crazy World (July 2022)

A reflective Farmer Focus written into the early summer of the post-Ukraine fertiliser crisis, with new-crop wheat over �300/t and inputs nearly doubled.

Plant-and-soil-health agronomy paying off pre-harvest

The move to Edaphos / Mike Harrington has visibly delivered: significantly less fertiliser, fewer fungicides and growth regulators, replaced with nutrition and trace elements that have kept the crop “healthy and growing at a steady pace.” Crops look healthy and clean. Blackgrass remains a problem to manage with delayed drilling and spring cropping.

“I’m convinced that very few of the answers to our problems lie in a can of product applied to a crop.”

Off the farm

A week in Brussels and Wageningen with the Institute of Agricultural Management Leadership Programme, then the annual reunion of his 2008 Worshipful Company of Farmers ACABM cohort in Suffolk visiting “diverse farming businesses as well as one of the leading racehorse studs in the world”, culminating in seeing a robot planting parsnips in Breckland sand.

Tribute to Caroline Drummond

A long, warm tribute to LEAF founder Caroline Drummond, who had recently died. Tom met her in 2013 on his Nuffield year group and remembered an 8-hour flight to Canada sitting next to her: “She was genuinely interested in what I had to say and would question why.”

Plans

A surplus-machinery clear-out, permission for a new grain store extension, and an awareness that with even the 50% BPS advance due in July, cash flow will be tight through the next few months.

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

Issue 20 — Five Years On and a 12m Drill (January 2023)

Chris Fellows asked Tom for a five-year retrospective on the magazine’s anniversary. In 2017 Tom was about four years into his no-till adventure with the Cross-Slot, still using a relatively conventional (if independent) agronomist, and applying around 300 kg N/ha for full-spec milling wheat. Five years later the kit and the agronomy are transformed.

The things we don’t do list

Tom lists Sewell family principles with characteristic bluntness: no P&K from a bag for 18+ years, no borrowing or overdraft, no machinery on finance, no Sunday working, no agents or consultants, no insecticides, no seed treatments, no 3C growth regulators, no baling of straw (except oat straw before wheat), no fee-paying schools, and no NFU membership. His father’s principles guide the approach: “Debt = Vulnerability” from 1991, and “we make money because we don’t spend money”.

The 12m Horsch Avatar

With a £25k FETF grant, the cross-slot + 4m Horsch Sprinter combination has been replaced by a 12m Horsch Avatar SD pulled by the same tractor. Two and a half times the width; half the fuel; later drilling possible to allow blackgrass to flush before pre-drilling glyphosate. First-wheats were direct-drilled into bean, grass and linseed stubble with home-saved untreated seed at ~4 L/ha diesel using a 16-year-old tractor. “No words needed!”

The Nicole Masters post-it

On Tom’s office wall: “MINDSET, MANAGEMENT, MICROBES, MINERALS, ORGANIC MATTER” — taken from a Nicole Masters talk. Alongside it: “Need or Want?” and “Watching or Doing?”

Infrastructure and collaboration

A new 500 m² grain store extension taking capacity to ~4,000 t home storage, concrete walls going in this winter, floor and apron in spring. Old power-harrow drill and Amazon fert spreader finally sold. Exploring collaboration with neighbours on spraying and harvest. Meeting attendance cut hard — “I’d much rather spend a day in the workshop in my overalls with the wood burning fired up listening to the radio whilst fabricating my new workbench!” Except of course the “Nutters meetings” and the “farmers fat-boy breakfast meeting”.

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

Issue 22 — One Step Back (July 2023)

Tom flags this up front as a “glass half empty” column, a deliberate counterweight to Farmer Focus pieces that only record success. 2022 was actually a good year — every ton harvested dry, sold some wheat above £300/t — but the last load this month went at £200/t and the spring has been painful.

Blackgrass, blackgrass, blackgrass

His new Edaphos-led agronomist, Tom Reynolds (a fellow “Nutter”), earned the nickname “Roundup Reynolds” on his first visit by recommending that several fields of very patchy winter beans be sprayed off because of unacceptable blackgrass. On visit two, beautiful even spring oats had to go the same way. Tom had already sprayed glyphosate the day before drilling, after three or four previous flushes since harvest.

“It seems from talking to others that I’m not alone in my ability to grow an incredible crop of problematic grass?! I’m sure every blackgrass seed in Kent has grown legs and marched ant-like to my farm with an ability to spot the sprayer entering the field.”

Selective herbicides this year he describes as “utterly useless”. Zero-tolerance spray-off now looks like the only option.

On the plus side

Wheat crops look full of potential at 150 kg N/ha in 2–3 liquid splits plus foliar AF Nitrogen at T3. Strawberry and raspberry compost deliveries continuing from the neighbouring soft-fruit grower — strawberry compost looks like fine coffee grounds, raspberry is coarser and needs turning for a year before spreading.

The bulk-seed-bag safety rant

A minor but telling preoccupation: Tom is unhappy with “2 tons of seed hanging above your head with the telehandler boom at full extension on a windy October evening”. He’s considering building a drill-filling trailer — likely an ex-gritter body with folding hydraulic auger — to hold 12–15 tons for a day’s drilling with the 12 m Avatar. A winter workshop project.

[Source: dd-issue-22, 2026-04-13]

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