Farming our Future

CHARLIE: Farmers are on the front line of food security, land management and the environment here in the UK. At Lloyds Banking Group, we're proud to be the biggest bank for agriculture, and I'm here today at Newlyns Farm to find out more about their business and their role in the community. So Rob, maybe we could just start with a bit of an overview of the farm, the livestock, the crops you have and the scale of production here.

ROB: So we've got about a thousand acres of a very mixed farm. So we are beef, sheep, pigs and then a bit of arable. My family have been farming on this farm for about 100 years. We have 180 suckling cows producing one calf per year. We've got about 300 ewes, which should produce us about 450-500 lambs per year.

Then we have 100 sows which will produce somewhere between 2000-2500 pigs per year. Our shop’s been going for 19 years, and over those 19 years lots of local businesses have grown up producing food, which is great because we're an outlet for those products. So lots of businesses have grown on the back of our shop really.

What are the challenges? 

CHARLIE: How is it working with the broader family?

ROB: Working in a family business always has its challenges. I'm not going to say that it's always easy, but it's great that my children will hopefully do it at one stage. It's nice to have that continuity.

CHARLIE: What have been the kind of challenges you've been dealing with in the last few years?

Cost of living

ROB: Cost of living has definitely affected us. Two years ago, the price of fertiliser with the price of electricity went astronomically high, but also the price of wheat went from £180 a tonne up to £300 a tonne. This meant that all of our inputs were really high, but now the price of wheat has collapsed back down again. Fertiliser has come back, but probably not to where it was before.

CHARLIE: What kind of inflation did you see on fertiliser?

ROB: It went from £250 a tonne to £1000 a tonne.

CHARLIE: So quadrupled in cost.

ROB: People had to look at their fertiliser usage and actually realise we could get away with using less fertiliser. So I think some of these things have a very positive outcome in the end. You can do things differently and still get good results.

Uncertainty

CHARLIE: You're dealing with massive uncertainty.

ROB: Farmers have always had uncertainty - the weather, for one - and I think farmers as a business have always been fairly good at diversifying and taking opportunities. We're probably quite entrepreneurial in some ways because

we've stayed where we are, put down roots and then grown businesses to cope with lots of different things.

Regenerative

CHARLIE: And then starting to evolve your practices to be more circular, more regenerative.

ROB: Exactly. Historically, all farms were mixed. By mix we mean livestock and arable. And so you get the benefit of both. These cows are obviously out at grass in the summer, but in the winter they’ll be housed inside and they’ll produce lots of farmyard manure. We grow lots of maize and that's a nitrogen-hungry crop, so we put lots of farmyard manure on that before we plant it. So it makes use of everything.

After an arable crop are usually winter barley because it's the earliest to be harvested. We’ll then plant turnips straightaway in sort of July, and they'll feed the animals over the winter and then it will go back into a planted arable crop in the spring.

CHARLIE: So it really is kind of a circular use of getting the animals to work with the crops and enrich the soil over time.

ROB: Yeah, very much so.

Sustainability

CHARLIE: We're standing here in front of this woodchip and I know you have a woodchip burner and that was one of the ways that you're being more sustainable.

ROB: Yes, we've got about 100 tonnes here. This chip will then feed our biomass boiler so it’s effectively just getting burnt. And the heat from that will heat the five houses on the farm and then two boilers will  dry chip, which will produce  the electricity for our farm shop.

Soil association

CHARLIE: And you have a relationship with the Soil Association, as Lloyds Banking Group has. And I know soil is at the heart of some of the practices around carbon capture, flood prevention and improving biodiversity.

ROB: Through Lloyds, the Soil Association came out and did an audit on our farm and gave us a carbon score, and it's a fairly good score, but there’s definitely room for improvement. And there's lots of cultivation methods that release less carbon into the atmosphere. So it makes us think how we do things.

CHARLIE: Certainly Lloyds Banking Group are hoping that we might be able to create a carbon credit market off the back of capturing carbon in the soil and actually generate a new source of income for farmers like you.

ROB: I think farmers would love to have a new income stream, but we're also very aware that as farmers we produce lots of carbon as well. So we've got to be careful that we're not selling all our credits then we don't have enough for ourselves.

Common Agricultural Policy

CHARLIE: As we've come out of Europe and the Common Agricultural Policy and the government in the UK is now talking about new incentives for supporting farmers. How's that working and is there clarity around that?

ROB: We all know we're going to lose subsidy connected to production, but now there’s schemes where instead of the subsidy being linked to the crop production, it's linked to the environmental benefits. And we've just entered into a countryside stewardship scheme which will last for five years. So every farm will have an area which isn't profitable for production.

It's a corner of a field, it's very poor soil. A lot of our grass has gone into no input grass which means we can’t put any artificial fertiliser on it and we can't blanket spray it for weeds. We'll get paid to have these things for the environment and it's enabled us to improve the biodiversity of the farm.

UK food production

CHARLIE: About 50% of the food that's eaten in the UK is produced in the UK. We need to produce more food with brilliant farms like Newlyns. If you look at some of these options to improve biodiversity or carbon capture, there can be trade-offs with food production. So how are you balancing those broader objectives and still being a great producer of food?

ROB: We've got to produce as much food as we can as a country because there's no point importing food from around the world because they've got the same problems that we have. It's crazy us importing soya from South America when we're planting all of our country into wildflowers.

In the farm shop

CHARLIE: Hi Abby. Rob was saying that for the thousand acres on the farm, he has about four full time people that work with him. I think you have 90 that work with you in the shop.

ABBY: It was very, very small initially, one butcher. The beef, pork, lamb, all comes from the farm. The cookery school opened, that was just an obvious next step. And similar to the café, it's a tasting plate for everything that we're producing for the shop. The ready meals are a big part of it. Everything you see on the deli counter is produced by us as well, so we needed more space and more chefs.

CHARLIE: And what happened through the last three years?

ABBY: During COVID, we shut the shop to the general public because we felt we couldn't keep our staff safe. So we set up eight phone lines overnight. It was all personal so they would ring, speak to somebody and then they’d collect it within an hour. That's probably the hardest four months of our lives.

Working together

CHARLIE: Not surprised, that’s amazing, you totally changed the way you interact with customers.

ABBY: Literally overnight, but it meant that nobody was furloughed. People were so resilient. It was a great sense of everyone coming together.

Family business

CHARLIE: I know Rob's the fourth generation farmer in his family to take over the farm. How are you thinking about the next generation in your family and the community and getting them involved?

ABBY: Our eldest son’s about to go and study agribusiness management, our youngest is wanting to be a land agent. We have tried to encourage them to not come home too quickly and bring some different skills back to what is an ever-changing business at home. And we also try and do that through apprenticeship schemes. We've got Shannon, who is in a team of eight butchers. She studies under Jason, who is a master butcher. So it's a great way of her learning on the job. And we have a similar system with our chefs as well.

CHARLIE: Because you've got a mixed use farm and then you've got a really significant retail operation, when do you get downtime?

ABBY: Not very often. Retail is a way of life, as is farming, but it's a good way of life.

ROB: I think farmers historically have always wanted to look after the environment. We love the countryside, we love our farms. Now there's far more emphasis being put on being sustainable and looking after the environment, but I think it's a balance. We've got to make sure we are profitable and producing food for the country, but also looking after the country itself.