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Farmer Stories

Matt Griffin - Achieving balance between business and nature

Scotland
Case Study
Livestock

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

Neidpath Farms is a large upland livestock operation working across some 2,500 acres and four farms around the town of Peebles in the Scottish Borders. Neidpath’s manager, Matt Griffin, lives on-site and is implementing a holistic, nature-friendly approach to agriculture learned on the other side of the world.

Brought up in southern England, Matt spent time on his uncle’s dairy farm in Devon and went to college in Gloucestershire. After a short time shepherding in the north of England, Matt spent 14 years in New Zealand, where he did holistic management training under renowned livestock farmer Allan Savory. This made a big impression on him.

“All my education before that had been very conventional,” Matt recalls. “Holistic management is about thinking of natural ecosystems, how everything works together and nature-friendly farming solutions. My heart was 100% in it, but most of our industry told me back then that I was barking up the wrong tree and we should be using fertilisers and sprays and chasing bigger yields.”

When we try to mimic nature, it all starts to come together.

Matt Griffin

Matt was able to put some of his ideas into practice managing farms in New Zealand and, after returning to the UK, found an opportunity at Neidpath, which was debating its own future.

“My predecessor was doing a good job of conventional farming, but the owner was asking questions about why inputs were so high, and it was so reliant on subsidies,” Matt said. “There was a feeling they were on a treadmill, always firefighting, waiting for the next problem. Right from the start, the owner and I were singing from the same hymn sheet. They want to leave a legacy of good soil health, ecosystems, nutrient cycling, biodiversity and improved water quality.”

Matt quickly set about making changes, moving away from a set stocking system. The livestock breeds were changed, with the farm now having Angus-based genetics for its cattle and a sheep flock based on the Romney breed. Both are smaller, native-type animals with a higher biological efficiency.

The grazing system was also changed to a mob grazing style approach. Before this could happen, though, new water systems needed to be built on Neidpath’s farms. Matt oversaw the installation of 25km of piping and 70 troughs plus 100,000 litres of water storage. He started with around 70 paddocks across the farms but subdivided them with around 30 km of fencing, so there are now around 200 paddocks. Cows are generally moving every day and sheep every other day, with the exception of six weeks of set stocking at lambing time. At times in summer, the mob of cows can be moved as many as four times a day. This has enabled the land to get lots of rest periods in between grazing.

We are building resilience in our farming system. We’re increasing the diversity of grass so our animals get a better level of nutrition, their immune system is better, and we’re not firefighting against illnesses all the time.

Matt Griffin

The use of cake concentrates has already dropped by 75%, and Matt hopes for a reduction of 85% across the winter of 2023-24. The cows’ diet consists of around 60% grass and 40% supplements such as silage or hay, with the younger stock having those proportions reversed. Generally, the farm is self-sufficient for year-round feeding. Initially, Matt sowed herbal leys but increasingly has preferred to let nature regenerate itself from the soil’s dormant seed bank.

Matt says the result of all the work his team has done is a dramatic change in soil health. “With a mob grazing style of management and built-in rest across the farm, our soil is starting to change,” he says. “We found it was very anaerobic, very compacted and bacteria-dominated. The rate of change has been astonishing in places. Short, high-impact grazing and long rest periods are changing our water infiltration rates, and it’s allowing us to draw down more carbon and cycle nutrients. We’re building up biomass, our root structures are changing, and the soil is armoured to stop it drying out.”

This has advantages for both the livestock and people living locally, Matt says. “Our animals are getting a more nutritious diet, and their immune systems are improving. There’s also less water running off the farm, which has an impact on flooding in our local towns. After heavy rain, cattle are still mob grazing, and our water is running crystal clear into the River Tweed.” 

As well as letting nature do its thing, Matt is giving the soil an extra helping hand. The farm has 50 JohnsonSu bioreactors creating fungal-rich compost to apply to the land. They have also designed a sprayer to improve the soil with the bugs from the material. Trials are being done to measure the effectiveness of a whole range of amendments, including applying compost brews, seaweed, grazing, and rest to the land. The farm is also involved in laboratory analysis of soil using the Haney soil health test, which measures soil biological health by looking at nutrient availability and microbial activity. It reflects the complex ecosystem of the soil instead of relying only on measuring “N, P and K”, Matt says.

Matt has moved away from using wormers and organophosphate dips to boost insects such as dung beetles, but invertebrates aren’t the only animals benefitting from the new grazing system. “Towards the end of summer, the swallows started associating the quad bike with the cattle moving,” he says. “The cattle moving into the next section would stimulate all the insects, the swallows would come to feed, and that was attracting larger birds of prey. That whole cycle of life is happening because of the way we are thinking about farming.”

That is crucial to Matt’s approach and the key lesson he took from his holistic management training. “When we try to mimic nature, it all starts to come together,” he says. 

Future plans include more enterprise stacking to go with the Oxford Sandy and Black pigs, which currently live in Neidpath’s woodlands, with ideas in the pipeline, such as mobile chicken tractors that follow the cows and community food projects. There are plans to expand the use of trees like willow for feeding animals as it contains medicinal properties and minerals such as cobalt and zinc. There is also a target of being financially viable without subsidies and a quest to increase resilience against dry summers and wet winters. “We have to be profitable,” he says. “I need to pay my people well enough to give them a good work-life balance. I also want us to be as environmentally as good as we can.” 

For Matt, the future for the uplands is a positive one. "We are part of the solution," he says. "We can deliver ecosystem services, and there are huge opportunities to offer long-term natural solutions to the changing climate. We can deliver clean water, draw down carbon and give people places to work. We can produce nutritious food and add diversity to the landscape, bringing in birds, insect life and vertebrates."