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Farmer Stories

Roy Mayers - Reducing chemical inputs through red clover

Northern Ireland
Case Study
Soil
soil health
red clover

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

At the western edge of Northern Ireland in County Fermanagh is the 180 acres of land in Tempo where Roy Mayers farms sheep and cattle. It’s an exposed spot, 600 feet above sea level, not far from the Atlantic Ocean. For Roy, farming in this elemental location, in the area where his family have made a living in agriculture since the 1960s, is a balancing act between production and working in a nature-friendly way.

Roy’s land is a mosaic of habitats, with about 120 acres of it consisting of grassland and other areas which aren't as viable for agricultural use. The family business started out on the 90 acres of the home farm where Roy still lives before the amount of land they farm was doubled through purchasing an adjoining farm in the year 2000. There are also a couple of lakes, several acres in size, and woodland areas on the farm.

Soil is your main production asset, and if you don’t look after it, you’ve lost everything. The soil feeds the grass, the animals eat the grass and whatever you’re producing feeds people. It’s all a cycle.

Roy Mayers

The farm has around 300 commercial breeding ewes, which are now mainly the Belclare native breed, along with around 80 beef cattle. The farm also provides a winter home for around 55 dairy heifers for two other farmers. The sheep are brought in over the winter from around October to lambing in March, as the farm’s location in Fermanagh doesn’t allow for lush spring grass to grow. The sheep are fed during the lambing season but are then able to thrive on the grass once they are outside using a paddock grazing system. This is based on a traditional rotational system where the sheep are moved every three days and return to a paddock after three weeks. However, Roy says this is only a guide, and sometimes it can be four or five weeks depending on grass growth and fitting in with the annual programme of producing between 600 and 700 bales of silage from the grass for the animals.

Over the past decade or so, Roy has been working to improve the established swards and reduce the amount of nitrogen and other chemical inputs used on the grass. This has culminated in his farm being one of 10 in Northern Ireland chosen for the ZeroNsile project, which involves using red clover and adding no chemical nitrogen at all.

Having been brought up on the home farm, Roy went to an agricultural college in Northern Ireland and was then given a scholarship to head out to New Zealand. There, he studied the establishment, management and use of clover in agriculture, which farmers in Aotearoa were pioneering. The other lesson he brought back from New Zealand concerned their work building up resistance to worms in livestock by reducing the amount of wormer used on them. This is an approach he's brought back to Fermanagh, with only underperforming lambs getting dosed and chicory being used in the multi-species swards as it has anthelmintic properties.

For Roy, the biggest appeal of a nature-friendly approach is its removal of some of the most strenuous cost burdens livestock farmers face. “If we can produce grass from our swards without using any artificial fertiliser, that’s a vast reduction in cost,” he says. “The two big ones we can definitely reduce are fertiliser and feed. We were spending a lot of money purchasing concentrate feed. Reducing that will definitely improve our bottom line.”

Roy is part of a grass monitoring programme at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI), which means all the fields get measured every week during the main growing season of the year. This is used to forecast grass growth as well as analyse how well pasture is doing in different areas and conditions. It’s not just the grass which is subject to regular scrutiny: both sheep and cattle are recorded and weighed regularly. Looking after the soil is equally crucial for Roy. “It’s your main production asset, and if you don’t look after it, you’ve lost everything,” he says. “The soil feeds the grass, the animals eat the grass and whatever you’re producing feeds people. It’s all a cycle.”

Roy is extremely enthusiastic about getting involved with research projects. The farm has been part of the Northern Ireland Better Sheep programme, which was run by the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise (CAFRE), the Irish Farmers Journal and the meat business, Dunbia. This involved looking at the genetics of the sheep to ensure they were best able to bring in good returns for farmers. The site is also one of three Environmental Technology Demonstration farms in Northern Ireland and regularly welcomes groups of farmers looking for ideas they can implement in their own businesses.

“In farming, you have to move forward and look at any new developments or ideas that can improve what we’re doing or make things better,” Roy says. “You have to try new things and see if there’s anything there that would work for your situation.” 

Roy is currently trying out a series of experiments on his grassland to see how they fare. Increasing protein production through growing beans hasn’t proved a huge success, but Roy has higher hopes for a test increasing the diversity of grasses and clovers on the farm. “What I’m looking for is still getting really good production while not having the cost and environmental impact of using artificial nitrogen,” he says.

We care for the environment, but we produce food at the same time, and there’s no reason why the two things cannot work together. Our philosophy is to produce food in a nature-friendly way by producing from natural grasses that grow without using pesticides or other artificial inputs.

Roy Mayers

Unsurprisingly, given the exposed location of Roy’s farm at a relatively high altitude, increasing habitats for nature and shelter for the animals has been a big priority. Over the last 20 years, around seven kilometres of hedgerows have been planted and maintained in an ‘A’ shape to maximise cover. Traditional woodland, based around trees such as hazel, has also been established. Open sheughs have been wired off to prevent animals from getting into them and polluting the waterways. Over 3000 meters of pipework have been installed, ensuring that fields have access to a water trough rather than drinking from a stream or river. These water troughs are fed from a natural well on the farm rather than mains water, which would have to be treated and pumped to the site.

These efforts have been rewarded on the biodiversity front, most notably with the arrival of red squirrels on the farm over the past few years. The lakes are also home to breeding waders and swans, and a recent bird survey found almost 30 different species on the site. Roy says this keen interest in protecting biodiversity comes originally from his father. “He had a keen interest in protecting nature,” he says.

For Roy, nature-friendly farming brings together two things that should always be intimately connected. “You can produce food and feed the nation while still protecting the environment and improving biodiversity,” he says.