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Farmer Stories

Colin Chappell - Adopting a whole farm approach with fewer chemicals and less soil disturbance

England
Case Study
arable
Crops

All imagery: Joanne Coates © for the Nature Friendly Farming Network

The Chappell family has been farming on the banks of the River Ancholme in the Lincolnshire flatlands for four generations. Today, Colin Chappell produces food not only on the 645-hectare family farm but across a total of around 2,000 acres on various pieces of land around the town of Brigg.

Colin describes himself as the custodian of the land he farms, and this meant making major changes to how the farm operates. His father employed a fairly intensive style of agriculture with ploughing and harrowing, something Colin says he found frustrating at a young age helping out. It was noticing the decline in nature around the farm, though, that prompted him to act.

“When I was a kid, we had eels in the ditches and were inundated with lapwings. Nature was everywhere,” he says. “Then, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, it disappeared. There wasn’t the noise and hubbub in the countryside any more. Now, with my more knowledgeable hat on, I realise that we, as farmers, had done this. It wasn’t intentional, but people wanted quick, readily available food, so that’s what we produced.”

The climate is definitely changing, and to keep producing food in this country, we have to change the way we do things.

Colin Chappell

Colin was initially challenged to move to no-till farming, and although he was sceptical, he chose one field and, as he puts it, “went cold turkey” on it in terms of cultivation. “The first year was OK; the second was a disaster; the third was alright, and the fourth, everything clicked into place. It took four years to get that field into no-till,” he remembers. Now, the farm moves and disturbs the soil as little as possible, and soil health is the basis of Colin’s nature-friendly approach.

The team at Chappell Farms extensively mapped the soil and biomass and started taking waterlogged and unproductive parts of fields out of agricultural use and setting them aside for nature. Colin has found that prioritising the most productive arable land has resulted in yields going down very little while giving biodiversity a major boost. The farm also set aside 26 hectares of land for growing miscanthus. In some places, Colin’s land has had no chemical input or disturbance of the soil for almost two decades.

He has also started measuring his carbon footprint and says that in three years, he has managed to shave off an impressive 1,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare. This is achieved by working out where nitrogen use is inefficient and using plants to cover the ground and the soil for longer periods of time. Anglian Water has a water abstraction plant at the edge of the farm enabling a monitoring of agricultural substances found in the watercourses, which is guiding efforts to reduce pollution.

Chappell Farms grows crops on roughly an eight-year rotation. It starts with oilseed rape, then has three years of spring cropping, including barley, oats or canary seed, which is used for bird food. This is then followed by spring peas, winter beans and winter wheat, and after that comes two years of winter barley. After that, the rotation returns to oilseed rape, though the farm has also started experimenting with growing maize.

Inputs have declined significantly. Colin says he has reduced nitrogen use on wheat grown for a major supermarket bakery from 280 kilos to 180 kilos, and elsewhere on his wheat crops, he has tried lowering nitrogen use to 100 kilos. He is also interested in seeing how low he can keep inputs while retaining the desired protein level in the wheat. He is highly critical of more intensive farming systems, which use more than double that level of nitrogen to produce milling wheat. “That is just burning the soil and not thinking about the environment at all,” he says. “All the goodness, all the organic matter, is being burnt off by the nitrogen.”

The farm previously had a large suckler herd, but Colin said the animals were too time-intensive for the money they were bringing in and were sold. Now a local shepherdess rents 32 hectares of grassland for her sheep and Colin would eventually like to have the animals grazing his cover crops. The farm has welcomed apprentices, too, and Colin says coming from a farming family has made him keen to open the industry’s doors to those who aren’t born into it.

Land ownership is the issue. How do you buy in without it? How can you get a tenancy without bank backing or infrastructure? Tenancies are mainly geared towards people who have land already and can afford to expand. I want to work with people who are trying to start out.

Colin Chappell

Colin works with The Country Trust to bring young people with very little access to nature to the farm. “They live in towns and cities with barely any green space, and when they arrive, they see wildlife and wide open space in front of them all the way to the Wolds. There are no street lights, no cars, no noise. Their faces are a real picture,” he says. He is concerned about a general disconnect between the public and farmers, saying previous generations employed dozens of local people on farms and acted as village hubs, something that is no longer the case.

As his nature-friendly farming journey began with noticing wildlife declines, Colin is pleased with the level of biodiversity on the farm. Lapwings have returned, there are deer in the fields, and pike have been seen in the river, as well as an otter, an animal found on Lincolnshire farmland in Colin’s grandfather’s day. He is also pleased to see birds of prey, such as buzzards, thriving. “The top predators returning should mean the rest of the food chain is in place,” he says.

With the farm being low-lying, flooding and the effect of climate change are major concerns for Colin. The River Ancholme now bursts its banks far more frequently than in his father’s time, and if there is flooding in February, the water can have barely drained away by April. Then there is the prospect of drought, with temperatures in 2022 reaching as high as 39.9C. To ensure the farm is resilient in the face of such challenges, Colin is prioritising soil health and changing the soil structure through plant nutrition rather than chemical inputs.

“The problem is that now it is boom and bust,” he said. “In my dad’s time, you would have about 100 millimetres of rain a month, but now it’s 100 to 150 millimetres in a month and then nothing. The climate is definitely changing, and to keep producing food in this country, we have to change the way we do things.”