Here at WildEast we want to create a wetter, woodier and wilder future for all living things across East Anglia.

A key part of this is how we farm.

Regenerative Agriculture, a concept that encourages nature both above and below the ground, is becoming more popular than ever, as Cambridgeshire farmer Tom Pearson explains.

“Regardless of how you farm, there will be nature trying to live on your farm. Depending on how you farm, there could be nature thriving, and this nature can actually work with you to produce nutritious food with less inputs”. Well, that's what someone told me when I started my farming journey, and it has been core to every decision I now make.

I took over the family farm six years ago. My Dad took advantage of environmental schemes and established wide tussocky field margins and beetle banks. He planted small pockets of woodland and avoided the trend of removing hedges. The land was conventionally farmed using a plough two out of three years and followed the popular high input high output farming system of the past 40 years.

I was lucky enough to arrive on the farming scene just as there was an explosion in the knowledge and excitement around soil health and regenerative agriculture. I started to understand that soil did not just have chemical and physical properties, but perhaps most importantly it had ‘biology’; it was a living ecosystem. A single handful of healthy soil contains considerably more life than the human population of our planet.



Drilling linseed ‘into the green’ cover crop in the late spring

The family had always tried to farm in a way that encouraged the nature above the ground… the birds, the pollinators, the beneficial insects. But we are now learning to farm in a way that gives the best opportunity for nature below the ground to thrive; the worms, the mycorrhizal fungi, the bacteria and everything in between. If we get it right, these little underground helpers will allow us to transform the way we can farm; using considerably less artificial inputs whilst maintaining yields, and with a number of other exciting positive side effects.

Now if you ever want to start a heated discussion with farmers, you should buy them all a pint and then ask them to come up with the definition of regenerative agriculture! In a nutshell, it needs to do what is says on the tin… regenerate; the environment, the soil, nature. Perhaps we should take it further and consider also regenerating our love of the land, regenerating our relationship to food and health and communities.  I will attempt to describe what Regenerative Agriculture means to me and where I think it could take us; and apologies to anyone who has a different viewpoint.

We have been moving blocks of our farm into regenerative agriculture practices for the last seven years with the last block starting its journey this autumn. I consider myself quite the expert in how not to do it, but hopefully I am now getting to a place where I am comfortable practising the core principles and seeing some of the encouraging signs of moving in the right direction.

Drilling linseed ‘into the green’ cover crop in the late spring

If I ever get round to putting up a sign on the farm to help us all keep on track, it would simply say ‘living roots and diversity’. We are trying to encourage nature below the soil, and what this nature likes is carbon. To get carbon they need living plants to capture sunlight and send the sugars (carbon) down their roots. So we try and keep living roots in the ground for as much of the year as possible, especially when there is lots of free solar energy to be had! We will plant ‘cover crops’ as soon as the combine has left the field. These grow rapidly in the warm late summer months and stay in the field until we sow our main crop in October or March.

These mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria need tiny spaces around the roots to allow them to interact and exchange carbon and micronutrients with the plants. A diverse mixture of plant species will send roots down to different levels, helping create structure in the soil. By leaving the soil alone (minimal or no tillage), the soil, with the help of diverse plant species, has a remarkable ability to self-structure and create a permanent quality home for this underground world to thrive.

Mother nature never leaves soil bare, and she doesn’t just cover it with just one species of plant. This diversity is not only with cover crops, it is also looking at all the crops grown for produce on the farm and trying to ‘widen the rotation’. We used to grow wheat, oil seed rape, and malting barley. We still grow these but now include beans, peas, linseed and oats in the rotation. We also try to grow two crops together (such as spring oats and beans) and give a winter crop a ‘companion’ in the late autumn (such as oil seed rape and berseem clover). A diversity in species also increases the diversity of mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria, further enriching the living ecosystem below ground.

We stopped using insecticides four years ago and, with our well established grass margins around the fields, seem to be do okay relying on our beneficial insects, such as carabid beetles and parasitic wasps, to deal with any pest issues we have. The healthier crops are also likely to be better at fending off disease and pests.

We will be increasing the habitats with agroforestry (lines of trees in our fields) and strips of wild flowers in the bigger fields. We are also taking most of the unproductive and odd shaped areas of fields out of production and planting wild flowers or over winter bird seed mixes.

With climate change bringing us warmer wetter winters and dryer springs and summers, our improving soil health and structure will be more resilient to floods and droughts.

We still have a long way to go, and every season brings as many questions as answers. But I can feel the direction of travel is the right one for me. Less inputs, same output, more birds, more worms, more beneficials, more pollinators, more diversity, more roots, more stored carbon, more fun.