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Farmer Stories

Matthew Elphick - Transitioning from set stocking to a multi-paddock pasture-fed system

England
Case Study
rotational grazing
Dairy
micro dairy
Soil

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

Brays Farm is managed through a regenerative approach beginning from the soil up, ensuring financial viability while biodiversity thrives.

Brays Farm is a micro-dairy in Surrey with 52 acres of sandy hilltop and fields with heavy clay soils. The farm is owned by The Countryside Regeneration Trust and tenanted by young, first-generation farmers Matthew Elphick and his partner Betsie Edge.

Despite having no family connection to agriculture, Matthew decided farming would be a good career choice for him at a young age. He studied at Plumpton College before working as a herdsman and a relief milker for a livestock services company. During this time, he managed to rent land to rear dairy-cross calves and, in 2017, took on the tenancy at Brays Farm. 

This style of farming is good for our ecosystem, good for our soil and better for our health. Our food is only as good as the soil it comes from.

Matthew Elphick

Drawing on his learning from college, Matthew initially farmed in a fairly commercial way. He started out at Brays with a beef suckler herd but, in 2020, fulfilled a long-running dream of switching to running a microdairy. A key starting point on his journey into nature-friendly farming was when he developed an interest in soil health, which led to reading Gabe Brown’s book Dirt To Soil, about saving a family farm from financial ruin by ditching fertilisers and artificial inputs and restoring soil.

“I had soil samples and silage samples taken, neither of which were very good,” Matthew says. “The commercial model doesn’t work for many reasons. I looked at our soil and feed, food for us, our ecosystem and our finances. Pumping fertiliser on the land and spraying has an economic cost as well as the environmental one which results in the loss of biodiversity in the fields.”

After reading the book, Matthew’s first step was to change the farm’s grazing pattern from set stocking to a multi-paddock system. The 50 or so acres of the farm were split into 30 parcels, and rotational grazing was introduced, so the Dairy Shorthorn cows are being moved around every day. In the summer of 2023, Matthew took the step of becoming 100% pasture-fed, and the farm is a member of Pasture For Life, with a long-term plan of becoming PfL certified.

The farm has 25 cows, with the Shorthorn breed being chosen as it thrives on a low-input, pasture-fed system. Matthew prepares for the cows to be wintered inside for around five months starting in November, though, in some years, the weather is nice enough in February for them to spend time outside.

With no use of synthetic fertiliser or chemical sprays for around three years, as well as the changes to the grazing, grassland biodiversity has started recovering with more insects, butterflies and dung beetles around the farm. Matthew’s adoption of agroecological techniques means there is no need to use worming medication as he instead encourages plants like bird’s foot trefoil, which have natural worm-controlling properties.

He's also started creating herbal leys on the farm, while one field has been sown with a wildflower mix to become a meadow, which he plans to cut for hay next year. Given the small size of Brays Farm, Matthew is aiming to grow around half the winter hay he needs for the cows on site. 

“When I really moved over to regenerative practices, I wanted to take the pressure off and get used to things like the rotational grazing. Buying in silage allowed us to do that,” he says. “You’re not going to get everything right in your first year. Perhaps we could have made our paddocks smaller, had more of them and moved the cows more so there are longer rest periods. It’s all a learning curve. We’ve done quite well with it and seen where we can make improvements.”

The micro-dairy’s nature-friendly approach is able to work financially as despite the lower yields from the cows, the cost of production is also a lot lower, and inputs are reduced or removed. That balancing act also came into play when it came to what to do with the milk. Selling off the suckler herd gave Matthew and his partner Betsie, who grew up on her grandparents’ dairy farm, some of the money they needed to convert the farm’s buildings and create an old-fashioned eight-stall abreast milking parlour as well as turning two cabins into a milk processing facility.

The long-term aim has to be a business that doesn’t require subsidy, and it needs to be commercially viable as well as environmentally sustainable. The two need to work together.

Matthew Elphick

Initially, they ran a doorstep milk delivery service, but increased energy and production costs coupled with the demands of the set-up on a two-person team led to a rethink. Now, the farm produces two kinds of cheese and live yoghurt, which are value-added products that help financial viability. Getting the products into the hands of customers is still hard work, with Matthew and Betsie travelling to farmers’ markets most weekends.

Matthew has plans for a wider range of products, though. His vision is for a small shop on site where they could sell milk from large dispensers on a bring-your-own-container basis and offer eggs from pasture. He is also interested in creating a sheep’s milk cheese. This would mean having a grazing system with the sheep following the cows and the chickens following the sheep. “With regenerative farming, a diverse range of animals is really helpful, working together to improve the soil,” Matthew says.

Matthew sees a future shop as a good way to raise awareness and improve knowledge of nature-friendly farming. He envisages information boards on the walls explaining how they farm and how this benefits human health and the environment. “I really want to promote that this style of farming is good for our ecosystem, good for our soil and better for our health. Our food is only as good as the soil it comes from,” he says.

Matthew admits to being frustrated when he sees criticism of farming cows on the grounds of environmental impact, especially given the way nature-friendly livestock farming can boost soil health.

“When it comes to combatting climate change, we need to literally start from the ground up with our soil. Cows play a big part in that,” he says. “Cows are one of the best tools we have to improve the health of our soil, which sequesters carbon and improves our ecosystem and our health. It’s not the cows; it’s the farming some of us are doing that's the problem, and that needs to change."