Tom & Pippa Blanchard kindly showed 22 people round their 1600 acre mixed arable dairy farm in November, finishing with hot drinks and delicious home-made cake. The Blanchards have 600 cows producing over 3 million litres of milk for Wyke Farm cheese, a small beef herd and grow 1000 tons of wheat every year. To support the dairy herd, they have 400 acres of pasture whose growth is carefully monitored for nutritional value using a “plate meter”. The cows graze each field for only 1 day per month and reach all parts of their farm on re-used concrete sleeper paths, as their greensand soils retain more water than chalk downland and become quagmires in the winter.
In addition to grass pasture and herbal-rich leys, 125 acres is down to lucerne (a kind of clover which fixes nitrogen) they turn into a protein-rich silage which complements their own maize silage, oats and barley for winter animal feed. These crops have drastically reduced their need for external feed supplies and eliminated soy and palm oil from their cows’ diet. As a result, the farm’s carbon footprint is now 15% less than it was only 5 years ago.
As well as growing the majority of their own cattle feed, the Blanchards have taken several other steps to reduce their energy usage and promote nature recovery. For example, they re-use all their slurry by piping it round the farm to fertilise adjacent fields and dehydrating it to transport it further afield. Cow health is carefully monitored using ear-mounted Fitbit-type devices, identifying sick cows early and reducing the need for antibiotics and vet bills. Waste heat from their dairy supplemented by electricity from a large rooftop solar array heats clean water from their borehole to wash the cows’ udders before milking.
With funding from the North Wessex Downs Protected Landscape scheme “Farming in the Protected Landscape”, last year they dug 4 settling ponds fed by water from the shed roofs and planted reed beds to purify wastewater before it enters Wilton Water. They are also growing 40 acres of wild bird seed to provide habitat and winter feed for wildlife, have many barn owl boxes and plant cover crops in the winter to improve soil quality and prevent soil erosion and nutrient leaching. So, they are another local farm who are well along the journey to regenerative farming.
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