The week started with a hot visit to Yeo Valley with the WAM PAM team Kate, Santiago and Mark. We were joining Lara and Elliott who were collecting in Audiomoths, and meeting Tom and Patrick who work at Yeo Valley. Was pretty cool to experience first hand how they are turning “nature-positive” farming from a buzzword into a practical, landscape-scale system. Tom was pretty passionate about the work they are doing to change farming supply chains - was pretty infectious. I learned all about rotational grazing, Agroforestry and mixed crops.

The farm use a structured, adaptive rotational grazing system for their cows (Dairy and Beef). Rather than letting livestock wander freely across massive fields for weeks (set stocking), they rotate them daily in subsections of pastures. Known as mob grazing, livestock are moved frequently to fresh paddocks. This allows the grass in resting paddocks to grow much taller, which drastically improves above-ground biomass and allows deep root structures to develop. Some of the fields we were walking through were chest high with grasses and flowers. The photo below shows one that had probably been left for about 40 days. This equates to about 6500kg of dry matter per hectare compared to the “usual” 2800kg that farmers typically would introduce cattle. (When grazed it is reduced down to about 1500kg).

Photo of Santi walking through a field to collect an Audiomoth.

They actively view their cattle as mobile bioreactors. As the animals move, they trample organic matter into the ground and spread diverse microbes through their manure, jump-starting nutrient cycling and feeding the soil microbiome.

Where ash dieback has cleared gaps in their organic woodlands, they have introduced conservation grazing. The cattle manage weeds and brambles naturally, benefit from the shade, and help cycle nutrients directly back into the woodland soil without the need for heavy machinery.

Photo of Beef Woodland Pasture - cattle graze under the canopy of dispersed trees.

It was also really interesting to see the mixed crops in their arable and pasture systems which rely heavily on diverse crop rotation and multi-species mixes. Because these species have completely different root depths and growth rates, the pasture is highly resilient. During extreme droughts or heavy rains, there is always a species in the mix that survives and keeps the soil covered. Growing different crops together simultaneously increases below-ground microbial diversity, optimises nutrient availability, and allows the harvesting of a diverse, home-grown forage silage for winter feed, eliminating the need for imported feed or synthetic fertilisers.

I found myself walking around increasingly wondering why all farms aren’t doing this. The buzz of the insects and the variety of life visible made this seem like common sense.

The work we are doing is to introduce methods for measuring the biodiversity and natural capital that is so obviously present in these “old” ways of farming. The Yeo Valley “measuring to prove” approach is key to avoiding abstract claims by anchoring their biodiversity and carbon tracking in hard data. We are contributing through our bioacoustics technologies to automatically monitor, quantify, and verify changes in bird, bat, and insect activity over time. We are also looking towards how to scale this bioacoustic tech to their 100+ supply farms.

More photos on Flickr Yeo Valley Album.

Photos from the week:

Front Garden blooming

Wet Leg at Ally Pally

Was a roadie at Somerstock

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• Alt bike bars - had a design meeting with Stayer cycles so links this week are mainly to bike stuff.
• Lauf forks - these look lovely.