Philip Raley has been a farmer for 37 years and has a tenanted farm that is part of the Escrick Park Estate, near York. He has 190 hectares across two holdings – Hill Farm in Stillingfleet and Wheldrake, which is eight miles away.
Philip produces wheat (80 hectares), winter/spring barley (35 ha), oilseed rape (30), oats (40 ha) and five hectares that are permanent pasture (hay) and wild margins. Oats are a bigger part of the rotation than they used to be, as oilseed rape is a less reliable crop because of issues with flea beetles.
Philip was one of the first Yorkshire farmers to be involved in LENs.
When did you first start introducing regenerative agriculture to your farm? Was this before you joined LENs?
In 2019, we bought a piece of equipment that would allow us to head in the regenerative direction. It was a drill that could drill into normal cultivated ground but also had capability to direct drill. We had some success but then we had a wet autumn, and it was an almost outright disaster. I got nervous of moving further in that direction and took a step back, sold the drill and went back to conventional techniques. I was concerned how going further down the regenerative route would affect my profit line. With LENs, I had the opportunity to dip my toe back in. I liked that I could pick the bits that work for our farm. I went to a meeting in summer 2022 and then applied for funding in 2023.
What was it that LENs offered that you weren’t able to get elsewhere – funding but what else?
Right from the start, it appeared to be more farmer-led than any other funding initiative I’d come across – I bid for what we want to introduce rather than having a prescribed list. It’s more interesting than ticking a box and filling in a form. Farmers need to be interested to be motivated, and LENs involves us in deciding what’s best for the individual farm.
The big advantage is that there aren’t penalties if you can’t implement something you signed up for, due to unexpected bad weather, for example.
What have you been able to do with LENs funding?
In 2023, we introduced cover crops, reduced fertiliser, integrated organic manure, and introduced minimal cultivation techniques. It’s useful that LENs options dovetail with SFI initiatives. For example, SFI funded a spring crop after a cover crop and LENs funding meant I could buy a more exotic mix, to widen the diversity of the cover crop.
These things might not sound ground-breaking, but we just wouldn’t be able to do them without funding.
The practices we introduced in 2023 were a mix of one-year and multi-year measures, so some continued in 2024 and some are still ongoing this year.
Integrating organic manure has been incredibly useful. We don’t have livestock, so we don’t have access to free manure. LENs funding meant that I could do a deal with livestock farmers. We’ve built relationships that we are keen to continue.
In 2024, we secured funding to use bio-stimulants and that has now become part of our strategy to manage plant health; predominantly they are used early in the growing season to bolster plant health and have enabled a reduction in the use of fungicides at the ‘T 0’ application window.
We also introduced biological nitrogen fixation. This is an expensive experiment and something I’ve been sceptical about, as there’s just no way to measure its effectiveness at farm level in the short-term. We probably need to use it for a few years to see a benefit. I just wouldn’t have tried it out without funding.
I’m growing a field of wheat and have not applied any chemical nitrogen. Instead, I’ve given it a good dose of biological nitrogen and am looking forward to seeing how that turns out in this year’s harvest. It’s just not something I could have done without LENs funding, as it’s expensive.
I have also continued with the move to minimal cultivation.
Is there a particular measure or innovation that worked particularly well?
For me, as an arable farmer, having funding to go out and interest another farmer in selling manure is a big benefit. We take farmyard and chicken manure from a nearby farm. It’s a labour-intensive and expensive process to get it and distribute it, so farmers need financial support to introduce this. There’s no profit in it for us; the benefit is what it will do to the land long term.
Have you bid for anything new to your farm in Trade 2025? If so, why did you go for this?
Cover crops don’t always work, so a group of us up here in Yorkshire are hoping to get funding for a year-long fallow with an option to destroy the cover crop in February and sew a new one. It’s to help control weeds. It’ll give you a good flush of greenery throughout summer, with the main crop sown directly into that soil. The reason is that if you have to leave a legume mix in a fallow field for one or two years, weeds grow in the bottom and drop seeds. By the time you come to mow the cover crop off, the field is actually worse because of all the weeds. We need a way to handle weed control when we’re trying a year-long fallow.
Thinking more generally about LENs, what would you say are the benefits that you feel other farmers should be aware of, which would encourage them to join a network?
LENs feels like a more collaborative agreement than most other funding schemes. There is more input from LENs and the funders than you would ever get doing a government scheme, for example. The other benefit is that there’s a recognition from funders and the supply aggregators that things don’t always go to plan – weather can affect ability to implement a particular measure. It’s just a lot more adaptable than simply ticking boxes, saying you’ll do it and then falling foul of a rule if you can’t.
It’s a lot more satisfying carrying out measures knowing that the funders are genuinely interested and trying to understand what you’re doing to make these ideas work on a production-based farming operation. LENs is geared towards farms producing key crops while being sensitive to environmental concerns. We want to farm but do it in a way that helps other industries, helps create food security and does it as sympathetically to the environment as possible.
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Philip Raley