View stewardship schemes as way of helping regenerate rotations

However, it is useful to recognise that certain activities already adopted on-farm – such as planting over-winter ground cover – may already be eligible for some new schemes, and could help to make future crop rotations more resilient to climatic and market volatility.

With current strong commodity prices, plus concerns around food security, it is important that any new scheme adopted also supported farm productivity.

Don’t think of stewardship schemes as taking land out of production.

See them as a subsidy to help improve farming practice, aid soils and enhance crop rotations. If you’re only just venturing down the regenerative agriculture route, don’t think you have to adopt every practice at once. Small steps may well see better returns.

Work with your agronomist to identify schemes and regenerative practices that work best for your farm environmentally, financially and practically, but which also help to get your land agronomically fit for the future.

As an example, in fields where controlling blackgrass is now a major problem, sowing a GS4 legume and herbs ley under a stewardship scheme could be an option to reduce the blackgrass burden.

Trials have shown that the Field Options GS4 Eco-Pasture mix also has the capacity to outyield a standard conventional ryegrass-only sward, grazed or cut for silage – although it must be appreciated there are management guidelines to follow.

As well as attracting payments and providing potential returns from grazing or silaging, this mix also has the potential to improve soil organic matter and biological activity, and soil structure.

For maize growers, we’ve also had a lot of success undersowing maize with grass. Once the maize has been harvested, the grass not only offers winter grazing for sheep, it also avoids bare stubbles over winter, with grass roots absorbing moisture to reduce run-off, nutrient losses and soil erosion. The technique can also improve soil biology, and can make it easier for the ground to withstand heavy maize harvesting machinery for better preservation of soil structure.

With high fertiliser prices, we have also evaluated the benefits of grass swards with clover. By the second and third year, results showed the dry matter yield of a clover and herb sward without bagged nitrogen almost matched that of a grass-only sward receiving a high dose of nitrogen.

Cover crops are valuable but can’t just be shoehorned in. They need to form a strategic part of the rotation. This is what agronomists are there for – to share learnings and help make cover crops work with the rotation, not just for guidance on establishment and management.

Emma Dennis of agronomy firm ProCam