It has been just shy of two years since my last article, and a lot has changed from both a business and personal perspective.

I’ll kick off with the personal.  In June 2023, Mia and I tied the knot.  Initially with an intimate ceremony with close family in London, before a small party with friends in the field behind the farmyard.  Somewhat inevitably, thirteen months later as I write this, my week-old son is asleep next to me.  It’s 5am and Mia is deservedly sleeping upstairs!  There is obviously no routine yet, but I am loving taking Bramwell for walks around the farm, meeting the cows, establishing his immune system, and hopefully not giving him ringworm (a lovely contagious skin disease that happily conveys from cow to human, and is a requisite for any farm kid – Mia and I both had it for our Wedding!).

Bramwell Æthelstan Ellis Young, born 6th July 2024

With the ecstasy of a new little man in my life came some sadness.  A couple of months ago my faithful Labrador Winston died.  I was gutted that he didn’t get to meet Bram, and we are now down to just our loopy Spaniel Nyx (affectionally known as Noodle).  She is anything but a cattle dog, so I am on the lookout for a new hound to help me with my day-to-day.  I have been banned from getting a puppy until Bramwell is at least three months old though.

The farm has changed quite a lot in the past couple of years.  I took the decision in the end not to replace my employee, Paul, who resigned in Summer ‘22.  And have instead been running the farm primarily solo since, with the aid of contractors where necessary, and the odd day from Mia, Dad and Mum.  This has necessitated changes to the business and has forced me to focus and be ruthless.  Consequently for the time being my flour mill stands idle, but hopefully that won’t be the case for too many more years.  As a project it taught me a great deal.

A lot of my focus has been on growing and finessing my cattle herd.  I just re-read my previous article from August 2022, in which I had just purchased some Beef Shorthorn heifer cows.  A couple of months after that I added some more in-calf Shorthorn cows and a Shorthorn bull.  From my original base of Red Poll cows, I am now going down the route of sticking to native breeds, but not dedicating myself to an individual pedigree.  This gives me much more flexibility to design a herd which functions well in the farming system I am creating, and has also led to me buying a native Aberdeen Angus bull to go alongside my Red Poll and Beef Shorthorn bulls.  Somewhat fittingly, the Angus bull is named Winston, and just as I lost my dog, he came along.

My herd has been ‘closed’ for about 20 months now.  This means that I am only growing my numbers by breeding, rather than buying cows in – a necessity for good health status.  The one exception is that I continue to occasionally purchase new bulls who go through a rigorous quarantine and health screening protocol.  I am also keeping some of my homebred bulls entire (i.e., not castrating them).  And it is with great satisfaction that one of my homebred bulls, Roquefort, is currently serving a bunch of cows.  His first time with a decent number of girls.

Just the other day I hosted the annual Field Day for the Red Poll Cattle Society (you may have noticed their flag flying in my gateway!).  It has apparently been cattle Field Day season in this little corner of Essex the past year, with a trifecta of pedigree herd society open days.  Alex Sell who farms to the North-East of us hosted a South Devon Field Day, and Andrew Frood & Helen Creed who farm to the South hosted a Simmental Field Day: their respective main breeds.  For me, it has been incredibly fascinating to visit their farms and discover their systems, both of which are considerably more established than mine, and have elements which are very similar alongside other elements which differ greatly.  I am most pleased that four years into my journey of building the Fobbing herd, I am getting asked to host, and sit on livestock panels at shows & events.  Being someone who has recently established a new herd, I feel that I have a lot to offer in the learnings I have made.  Even more so since I have been so heavily informed and influenced by my vet-wife!

The main big project that has occupied my time has been the Wild Seam.  This project is being funded with designated funds awarded by National Highways.  This funding is turning my idea from something pretty cool to something I genuinely believe to be excellent, with the results already becoming clear on the farm: the increase in biodiversity in a relatively short space of time is astounding.

The Wild Seam is an area of land running through the middle of the farm, connecting each field on the farm together, and providing a permanent area of undisturbed organic habitat.  The idea being to ensure that wild birds and animals always have a place to reside, and if birds or animals drops seeds those seeds will have the opportunity to grow and thrive.

The works completed thus far include a lot of hedge planting, fencing and culverts (piping of ditches to enable animal crossing points).  Still to go are the digging of ponds and planting of orchards, plus some general groundworks.  But the really cool stuff is not the infrastructure, but rather what happens when Nature takes over.  I am utilising the cows in short sharp bursts to cause natural levels of dynamic destruction.  Essentially, they are let into the seam and left to go where they like – there will be places they like more than others, leading to some areas remaining (in the long run) as open clearings, whilst other areas will scrub up, eventually growing up with trees (over the next few decades).  The coolest thing of all is me not knowing how this is going to progress!  And as with everything on the farm, as I witness what occurs, my ideas will change, and I will likely alter management and design as a result.

Beyond the Wild Seam, Farm & Country Fencing are just completing the ring fence on the farm.  Something I am relieved is finally happening, since whatever happens it means the cows should stay on the farm.  I don’t want to make the news or go viral with my cows out bumbling down the High Road!  Plus all this fencing will also have hedging planted against it this Winter.  Additionally, I am in the final stages of designing copses for across the farm (some of which will be planted this Winter) with funding from Thames Chase, a local charity.  Going forward, these copses will be critical to the management of my cows.  The term banded around in the industry for these planting schemes are ‘green barns’ – natural blocks of trees which function as shade from the sun and shelter from the wind & rain for livestock.  It just takes a long time for them to grow into something useful!

In terms of big changes to the farm, the solar farm being put forward by ENSO for our marshes was approved by Planning Inspectorate Appeal earlier in the year.  Whilst this scheme has proven contentious with a few members of the village (as any infrastructure project inevitably will be) I genuinely believe that it will be a project to be very proud of.  It will generate a lot of electricity.  But secondarily, it will continue to produce a lot of food, and a huge amount of biodiversity habitat.

My Wild Seam was designed in tandem with the solar project, with the land outside the fenced solar panel paddocks adding to my seam, and growing it from approximately 60 acres to closer to 200 acres.  Pretty mega.

The solar also pushes me to get sheep.  Something that Mia is exceptionally excited about, and a project that we have already begun thoroughly researching.  It will be a couple of years yet before the sheep arrive, since the solar park needs completing first, but by commencing research now I hope to avoid some of the pitfalls I have had to deal with establishing my cow herd.  Mia desperately wants Herdwick sheep, and I have kowtowed to letting her have a few, but the main breed I will be getting I have yet to confirm.

In terms of land use under the solar panels themselves, sheep is an exciting prospect.  The marshes where the panels are going did previously grow some arable crops, but that was only possible using chemicals and fertilisers – no longer part of my regime as an organic farmer.  What’s more, in order to carry on growing crops, new land drains would be required at great financial expense to keep the land free-draining (preventing water-logging which would hamper the yield and potentially kill the crop).  And those land drains would need replacing every 20-30 years (the ones installed previously are clogged up with mud and no-longer function).  So, regardless of the panels, I had decided to return these marshes to how they were originally designed when the land began being reclaimed 400 years ago – as rough grazing.

The addition of solar panels actually increases grass production, and the welfare for the sheep that get to graze in the fields with the panels.  The panels provide shade & shelter, plus mitigate from extremes of heat in the Summer, keeping grass growing for longer and storing more moisture in the soil.  This aids with carbon capture and increases lamb production off the same area of land.  Whilst simultaneously producing green electricity, which sounds pretty epic to me. 

What I will be ensuring though is that I have a decent handling system set up for when the sheep arrive.  Having worked with temporary handling for the cows for the past four years (and as a result become somewhat battered and bruised and broken) I want to ensure an easier time when sheep are here!

On the subject of handling systems, I am most excited about the one I am getting for the cattle.  With a mixture of DEFRA Government funding (through the Farming Equipment & Technology Fund, FETF), funding from the Wild Seam through National Highways, and the balance paid for by the farm, I have purchased an all singing permanent cattle handling system from Kiwi company Te Pari.  It is being built currently and won’t land until the Autumn, but will totally transform the management of my cows here.  Since most of the time I run the cows single handed, and we vaccinate and do our hi-herd-health testing, my animals are handled a lot more regularly than most.  So having a system that at the end of the day leaves me walking limp-free will be a boon!

With regards improvements with the cows, I am also looking to begin housing some animals over Winter.  For the past three winters, all of my animals have been left out to their grazing pastures the entire year.  But the herd has grown considerably from the initial eleven cows in Winter 21-22 to over 90 now, with the aim to grow the herd to 100 breeding cows (which will give a total herd size of 300-350).  With increasing numbers, this Winter just gone was the first time I had to bale graze – bringing fodder in the form of round hay bales out to the cows each day to ensure they had enough grub.  This job felt like drudgery in a gross wet Winter like the one we have had, enabling me to only have one day off in five months (not exactly sustainable).  And getting stuck on the quad bike hauling bales, only then to make a massive muddy mess with the forklift unsticking myself – not fun at all.

The benefit of keeping cows out is that it keeps fresh dung on the ground which maintains the ecological cycle, especially for creatures like dung beetles.  So I am looking to move to a hybrid system where some animals continue to rein outside, with numbers low enough to be able to survive on just what grass has grown naturally, whilst others are brought inside, fed on excess grass from the farm grown the previous Summer, preserved in the form of hay bales.

I am also looking to bring some of my calving inside.  As I have increased the herd, instances of calving difficulties have increased proportionally.  As I continue to improve my animals, assistance at calving should become less and less important, and consequently I will keep experienced animals calving outside.  But I want to have a shed with decent CCTV where I can keep an eye on first timer calving heifers.  My expectation is that it will take at least ten years to be happy with how my herd is functioning on the farm, and it will be a lifetime’s work (including for Bramwell!) to continue finessing.

Naturally, being the month of July, harvest is looming large.  As with every year now, the weather has been peculiar.  Harvest is commencing about a fortnight later than the last few years, with early reports sounding pretty good on the Winter Barley that has been cut.  However, knowing what my crops look like, it will very much be a ‘some & some’ year!  With such a wet Winter, you can’t expect anything apart from that.  I just have fingers and toes crossed for enough clear spells of dry weather for my contractors, Alan & Bob Bird, to get the crops safely off the fields and into the barn!

Remarkably, Bramwell has remained asleep for the duration of my writing!  I will endeavour to write somewhat more regularly than biannually moving forward.  In a low-key way, I continue to post on Instagram with the handle @farmingGeorge, so if you desire you can keep up to date on my farming activities there.  I am also planning on hosting some form of farm walk in September (for Organic September), so please keep your eye on my Instagram or the Fobbing WhatsApp group for information on this.