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Farmer Stories

Pippa Southorn - Ensuring arable farming and nature thrive together in lowland Kent

England
Case Study
arable
biodiversity
climate change
Crops

All images: Pippa Southorn

Pippa Southorn is transforming 900 acres of marshy, low-lying land on the Isle of Thanet, Kent, with a nature-friendly approach that marries agriculture with biodiversity. She's ensuring this vital landscape thrives, stays profitable, and is ready to meet tomorrow's challenges.

Abbey Farm consists of 900 acres of low-lying, flat arable land on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, split roughly half and half between marshland and loamy soil. Re-connected to the mainland when the Wantsum Channel silted up, the island still holds water and land in a delicate balance. This rich landscape is ideal for growing crops and serves as a sanctuary for wildlife. As development continues to encroach on Thanet to meet the South East’s growing population, places like Abbey Farm - where nature and food production coexist - are more valuable than ever.

Ironically, the future of the farm rests in the hands of two people who grew up on farms but never planned on farming as a career - Pippa Southorn and her husband James. Farming runs deep in Pippa’s family, with her grandfather farming in Lincolnshire before relocating to Romney Marsh in Kent. However, Pippa's return to Abbey Farm stems from a tragic turn of events. After her brother was killed in a farm accident and her older sister chose not to continue farming, Pippa left her advertising career in London to return to Abbey Farm and work alongside her father until his passing.

"We farm some of the last remote areas in Thanet. We are becoming a heavily-developed area and we needed to find a balance with everything that was going on around us."

Pippa Southorn

Pippa’s dad was a traditional farmer from an era when maximising production was the top priority, and there were few financial incentives to adopt environmentally-friendly practices. His passion for nature was largely restricted to planting trees in the farmhouse garden. “For him, it was all about maximum yield and quality,” Pippa recalls. “He also grew a lot more vegetables, but eventually, that merged with salad crops due to supermarket pressures. Having lived through the Second World War, his focus was always on putting food on the table with ‘Dig for Britain’ and all that.”

By the time Pippa and James took over the farm in 2007, priorities in parts of the farming world had shifted. Funding was becoming available for approaches that went beyond maximizing food production. Witnessing nature being squeezed by a building boom on the Isle of Thanet, Pippa decided this was the path she wanted to follow.

“Our marsh and the River Stour are some of the last remote areas left on Thanet,” she says. “When a storm hits, many of the wild birds that would be down at the bay follow the river up on to our land to sit it out. With the area becoming heavily developed, we were trying to find a balance with everything happening around us.”

Pippa found the opportunity to strike this balance through a scheme run by Natural England. They suggested that 19 hectares of land along the river, which had been used for crops in her dad’s day, be taken out of food production and reserved for nature. Scrapes were put in to create shallow wetland areas to attract waders and other water birds, remaining wet throughout the winter and drying out in the summer.

Natural England’s plan also involved managing grasses of different lengths across various parts of the farm, planting plots of winter bird food on arable land, and establishing nectar plots to encourage pollinators and beneficial insects.

"A lot of our plots for bird food and nectar are on land that’s difficult to farm. Natural England were looking for odd corners and places that aren’t easy to get to on the farm."

Pippa Southorn

Abbey Farm has also been using a no-till approach to cultivation for a decade, a decision Pippa made to preserve the health of the farm’s heavy, marshy clay soil. Although this choice initially came at a cost in terms of production, Pippa persevered and is now reaping the benefits. “We did experience a drop in wheat yields at first after going no-till,” Pippa admits. “It took about five years of losses and cover cropping on the marshes for yields to catch up. But everything adjusts over time, and it has been worth it as it has been brilliant both for the soil and nature.”

Even during those early years of lower yields, though, no-till farming reduced operational costs by cutting down on tractor passes, lower fuel bills, and reducing the reliance on expensive machinery. With recent spikes in fuel prices due to global political volatility, Pippa sees this approach as an increasingly wise decision, as she doesn’t expect fuel costs to decrease in the short to medium term.

Pippa wasn’t too concerned about Natural England’s plan to remove portions of her land from food production, as it wouldn’t significantly impact the farm’s financial bottom line. “Many of our bird food and nectar plots are on land that’s difficult to farm. Natural England targeted odd corners and hard-to-reach areas on the farm,” she explains. The exception was some of the nectar plots which run through the middle of Abbey Farm’s salad fields. However, Pippa notes that these have become valuable corridors for birds such as partridges, and the land still has an agricultural function as they run their irrigation pipes underneath them.

Around a third of Abbey Farm is dedicated to growing salad leaves, another third to wheat, and the remaining third is split between two other crops. These are decided on a year-by-year basis and could include spring oats. Pippa believed they had found a useful and profitable niche with quinoa, but that has currently been put on the backburner.

“Quinoa is a spring crop that can be grown on our marsh. The yields were really good and so were the prices, since it isn’t a commodity crop,” Pippa explained. "However, the variety we really liked to grow suddenly became unavailable. We tried other varieties, but the yields weren't as good. We’re going to take a break from quinoa for now. We also need to improve the drying process; quinoa must be dried to 13% moisture within 24 hours of harvesting, and we were harvesting at around 30%, which made the drying quite challenging.”

To add to the frustration, Pippa found that quinoa fit well with a nature-friendly approach to farming. “Because quinoa was such a new crop in the UK, there were basically no herbicides or pesticides approved for it,” she says. “Our quinoa had absolutely no chemicals on it, yet it thrived without any spraying. While aphids would attack it, beneficial insects like parasitic wasps and ladybirds would come in, and a natural balance was established.”

"It took about five years of losses and cover cropping after going no-till for yields on the marshes to catch up, but it was worth it because everything adjusts over time."

By establishing predatory insects to control pests and implementing other nature-friendly practices, Pippa can often skip some of the conventional treatments required for wheat. Her approach to synthetic inputs is to "use as little as possible and avoid unnecessary spraying," a decision that balances environmental benefits with financial pragmatism. "Chemicals are expensive and should be a last resort," she says. "If you overuse them, you risk going bankrupt."

For Pippa, cover cropping has been a hugely significant part of Abbey Farm’s gradual transition towards a more nature-friendly approach. After harvesting, mixed cover crops are planted to ensure the ground remains covered with greenery, preventing bare soil exposure. Pippa notes that radishes have been particularly useful on the marshy land, helping to break up the soil and tackle compaction issues. “Cover crops act as a green manure, absorbing any leftover nitrogen and improving the health of the topsoil. The cover crops that remain over winter also help birds and mice,” she says.

Protecting the health of Abbey Farm’s soil is at the heart of Pippa’s work. “It’s so important to look after your soil,” she says. “Nobody wants to end up with a desert.” Maintaining healthy soil is also crucial for making the farm resilient in the face of climate change, which is already having a significant impact on this exposed, low-lying part of eastern Kent. “We had a 150% increase in rainfall in 2023,” Pippa said. “After 10 years of no-till farming and cover cropping, there’s no doubt our soil can absorb a lot more rain.” With the likelihood of hotter, drier summers and periods of drought, two reservoirs have been created on Abbey Farm. These reservoirs are filled with water from the river during winter floods and then supply the necessary water for salad crops in the summer.

"Chemicals are expensive, so they should be a last resort. You'll go bankrupt if you overuse them."

Pippa Southorn

Abbey Farm has recently gained a boost in financial viability with the introduction of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme in England, which offers payments to farmers for a whole range of environmentally beneficial actions. Pippa plans to stack several of these options to generate more income for Abbey Farm, including eliminating insecticides on arable crops in 2024, planting cover crops, pollen and nectar mixes, flower blends, winter bird food, and conducting soil assessments. While the SFI scheme hasn't been universally welcomed by the English farming sector, Pippa finds it quite manageable for her approach and hopes it will enhance their bottom line. She is also exploring carbon credits to gain financial recognition for the carbon her farm is sequestering.

Looking ahead, Pippa hopes to capitalise on the growing public interest in having high-quality, locally grown vegetables delivered to their doorsteps. However, this poses a challenge for Abbey Farm. At 900 acres, the farm is too small to supply large contractors like supermarkets but too large to switch to a grassroots model focused on farm shops or veg box schemes. “It’s tricky because people would want a wide variety of vegetables, and that would require a lot of expensive labor,” Pippa says. “I’m keeping it in the back of my mind, though, because it’s clear that this is what the public wants.”

Another long-term project for Pippa includes planting more trees in the upland areas of the farm. She hopes this will help counter Thanet’s increasing tree depletion. The garden her father filled with trees is already a haven for nature, with barn owls and tawny owls among the birds benefiting from the mature trees, which are becoming increasingly scarce in the region.

That’s not the only part of the farm boasting impressive biodiversity. Despite the sharp decline in turtle dove populations due to decades of intensive arable farming, these birds are still present at Abbey Farm. Additionally, golden plovers find shelter from winter storms on the farm, and partridges benefit from the wildlife corridors that have been established.

Currently, Pippa faces a new concern. The National Grid is planning Sea Link, an enormous infrastructure project to lay a giant cable between Suffolk and Kent, aimed at transporting power from offshore wind farms to homes and businesses across southern England. Although the project is still in the planning and consultation stages, Pippa worries that her farm might be affected. “I fear we’ll lose all the benefits of our years of no-till farming and carbon sequestration,” she says. “I’m concerned that such a massive construction project will be very disruptive for us and for nature.”

This situation underscores the complexity of moving towards a lower-carbon, more environmentally friendly future, where few solutions are straightforward and many questions remain challenging.