Alice Dyer and Adam Lockwood are new entrant farmers growing baby leaf salad crops across 142 hectares (350 acres), rented from six landowners, including a 53ha (130-acre) Warwickshire County Council tenancy near Evesham to grow their organic business. Adam manages the farms full-time and Alice is an arable specialist at Farmers Guardian/Agriconnect.
Spring is just about in the air at Lower Farm and we have been taking full advantage of the good ground conditions.
Cultivations for spring arable crops alongside ground work and bed preparation for the first salad drillings are well underway, with conditions being confusingly good for the time of year.
Our first salad crops will be drilled this week two weeks earlier than a typical start, but it just seems too good an opportunity to miss. The term fools spring has been thrown at us by neighbours and landlords. I guess we will find out.
When we started the farm business five years ago, we worked closely with landlords and contractors for the majority of the big tractor primary cultivation work, to reduce expenditure on expensive large equipment.
A combination of expansion and, in an attempt to get a grip on spiralling production costs, we have invested in another tractor and some proper farming toys to go with it.
This will not only cut costs across the season, but also will allow us to expand further and ensure that jobs are completed exactly when we need them, which is key to the nature of our just-in-time production.
It is always a conflicting time of year. We are excited for the longer days and warmer weather that brings the joy of spring, however, we are always slightly hesitant of the long hard season we have ahead of us.
Lambs
Once the drills start rolling on the salads, that is it until the middle of September with consecutive drillings happening multiple times a week and harvest every day.
It also wont be long until lambs start dropping, although Im not sure what to expect after two dogs attacks have taken place in not so many weeks, frustratingly nowhere near a footpath.
With no permanent fencing yet and everything just electric, the only solution I can think of for now is to keep them on poor grazing, but near the house. I cant bear to keep letting it happen and just hope I catch them in the act one day.
At the beginning of the month, we welcomed four in-calf Longhorn heifers onto the farm. These gentle giants have really brought further life to the place.
My mother has always loved native and rare breeds, most notably Highland and Fell ponies and its a passion Ive inherited, minus the horse obsession, luckily.
I read a few weeks ago that, although we think of giant pandas as being near extinction, there are more left in the world than there are Saddleback pigs in Britain how sad.
