How Pulse Pioneer, John Seed, has been Building Farm Resilience
By taking part in carbon assessments on his farm John Seed has been able to identify areas for improvement and instigate a raft of changes to improve the business’s sustainability.
Energy, fertiliser and imported feed for his laying hens were identified as the main sources of carbon emissions. So as well as installing solar panels, a biomass boiler and wind turbine, he has made changes to management practices and started growing faba beans to replace a proportion of the soya fed to his free-range hens.
As well as beans John grows oats for Quaker, winter wheat for milling and spring barley for malting on the farm near Duns. Improving biodiversity is a focus and he has 16% of the farm in margins, beetle banks and other environmentally friendly areas. In recent years he has moved away from ploughing to a direct drilling approach, an investment which he says has paid off.
John says: “We’re now at net zero on our arable unit based on growing beans, doing minimum tillage, having green cover crops and margins, doing all the things that we do.”
He continues to experiment to find ways to make further improvements across the farm including Bokashi fermentation – mixing poultry manure, chopped straw, woodchip and acti-ferm in an ag bag – to create compost which he hopes will reduce ammonia emissions from the poultry unit in the process.
The changes to reduce dependency on soya were initially prompted by rising feed costs.
“We started feeding our own grain to the hens when the egg price was below the cost of production, and we had to find ways to do it better. We discovered that 82% of the carbon emissions from the poultry unit came from purchased feed, and particularly from soya, so we set about trying to reduce that.”
An SAC report promoting home-grown proteins gave him a further nudge to start growing beans to supplement the diet of his 32,000 hens. Several years on and he has honed his system to make better use of the crop. The level of beans starts at 5% when the hens first arrive at 16 weeks of age, and increases to 18% as they mature.
“We are still buying soya, but feeding beans even at 10% reduces our carbon emissions by about 400t a year, just from that simple thing alone,” he says. “I’m excited about the ability to dehull and process beans too.”
His interest in beans led him to join the NCS project as a Pulse Pioneer, and he has since become a great advocate for taking part in funded research.
“We need that support because of the risks involved. For example if you’ve got a shed of hens and you feed them too many beans the methionine levels drop and they start feather pecking. They go off the lay and it costs you a fortune. It’s heartbreaking.
“You need to have government sponsored proper research so we can try new approaches. The NCS project has been a joy for me, and I’m pleased to be part of it.”
Like the other Pulse Pioneers John’s trials focus on the agronomy of growing beans and subsequent crops. In the first year (2023-4) he looked at the impact of over sowing both spring beans and oats with clover in Garden Park Field. In year two the same field has been planted with winter wheat and he is assessing the impact of last year’s clover and beans on the wheat.
He has also brought in a second field – Broomhill Field – planted with winter beans and a spring oats comparison where he is looking at the effects of soil phosphate activator Agrii-Start Release.
“The clover undersowing worked well in the spring oats, improving soil structure and moisture retention, but it wasn’t successful in the beans, so we won’t be repeating it there. Learning from this, we’re refining our approach to maximise benefits where they work best,” says John.
“The new trial with Agrii-Start should help us make better use of our poultry manure by improving phosphate availability and nutrient cycling.
“Certainly, the NCS project has provided a valuable platform to let us explore these challenges while minimising risk to us and contributing to a more sustainable supply chain. This is all part of our efforts to build resilience in our farming system.”
It is all fuelled by a drive to make the business more profitable and more sustainable which he would like to see recognised by retailers. “We are reducing our carbon footprint by over 400 tonnes a year. We are sequestering carbon and we’re rebuilding biodiversity. The reality is that the retailers demand sustainability, but we don’t get paid for it.”
Action from the government to support and demand change, namely a policy for the inclusion of home-grown protein in livestock feed, is also urgently needed, says John.
“We need the market conditions and policies to make changes. It can happen quickly if the signals are clear. We want policies that reward sustainability, and we want markets that value farmers’ efforts.
“It’s not hard and yet, it appears to me, the policy makers and the retailers are able to find reasons not to deliver it.”