Farmer Lucy Noad qualified and worked as a vet before moving into dairy advice and consultancy. When she married Rob, she came onto the farm full-time and they began their journey exploring different approaches to dairy farming, ultimately finding an approach that feels right and pays the bills: a regenerative system.
My husband and I farm 220ha in Wiltshire. In 2009, the family chose not to renew their organic status. We then farmed 90 Holstein Friesian cows with a rapidly increasing yield and 200ha with fertiliser at our disposal. We set off on a 14-year-long quest to achieve the targets the dairy industry was pushing us towards - more milk, more cows, more investment... and then repeat. The 90 cows, which had been calving all year and yielding 7,200 litres while grazing for long seasons and being housed in loose yards, fed baled silage and parlour cake, became 150 cows (and rising). They transitioned to autumn-block calving, yielding 9,000 litres, housed in new cubicle sheds with new slurry systems, new youngstock buildings, new silage clamps, and a (not quite new) mixer wagon. Long-term leys became medium-term PRG and white clover leys, or wheat, or maize.
‘Double your failure rate’ - Dairy farmer Lucy Noad’s story of trial and error
The dairy industry was pushing us towards more milk, more cows, more investment ... and then repeat.
Did it work as a business model? It would have with more cows... or more milk, preferably both. And we were well and truly on the treadmill! Cows were still grazing through spring and summer, health KPIs were brilliant, and with the breeding programme of "as many HF heifers as we can cope with," the expansion of the herd to the target of 190-200 was progressing quickly. At that point, the investment would be at capacity, and we could take stock and ease the cash flow a bit - or so we thought. In January 2023, we changed our milk buyer and became a member of First Milk (a farmer co-operative).
As Head of Hoop Jumping, I was tasked with completing our first "Regen Plan" - First Milk’s data collection of how we are farming each field. I submitted it and went back to farming. But six months later, when we sat down with First Milk to discuss the plan, something shifted. With a premium to the milk contract on offer ("more hoops," I thought!), for the first time, I was honest with myself - we were desperately unhappy, not making any real money, and totally out of love with dairy farming. "I think we are selling the cows," I declared, much to my husband’s (and my own) surprise.
I will forever be grateful for the initial response from the other side of the table: "If you’re not committed to dairying long-term, we don’t want you" - a red flag to a bull for me! But it was the second response that truly changed our path: a conversation about learning the mindset of regen farming. That conversation was a turning point - a way of farming that we could be proud of.
What we have done differently over the last year isn’t a fringe activity to dairy farming - it is our "why."
Why is this lengthy account of how we came to farm regeneratively important? Because it is about a mindset shift. What we have done differently over the last year isn’t a fringe activity to dairy farming - it is our "why." And as for the title of this piece, "Double Your Failure Rate" - that’s exactly what we’ve done, and then some. Lots of it failed, but all of it taught us something.
Our most educational failure was maize. We can grow maize without sprays, artificial fertilisers, or ploughing, but we need to get the timing better. And here, I do blame the weather! But if the weather no longer suits the crop, then we won’t grow it anymore. It currently contributes 50% of our forage for the winter, so this won’t be a decision made in haste. This year, it was undersown with white clover; if we grow it again, we hope to strip-till and dual crop with climbing beans. We also need to find more reliable ways to establish herbal leys. We tried overseeding into perennial ryegrass leys in the grazing block, and it is a fine art of timing and weather that we mostly got wrong this year - but we will not be discouraged!
Where are we now? 190 cows, autumn calving, target yield of 8,500 litres. Regenerative dairying must appeal to the average dairy farmer, and I started off as just that. In terms of cow performance, I intend to stay there. We are focused on benefiting nature and gaining our RSPB Fair To Nature accreditation. We are about to embark on year one of planting silvopasture, planting new hedges, and rejuvenating existing hedges. We aim for every grazing field to have in-field trees for shade and browsing. We will continue establishing herbal leys and adding wildflower mixes into areas of every field, including buffer strips in the arable fields. We aim to grow starch and protein to improve the yield of milk from home-grown feed.
There is a lot of knowledge about how to farm regeneratively, but we need data and results to back it up.
Our priority is measurable outcomes. There is a lot of knowledge about how to farm regeneratively, but we need data and results to back it up. We’ve done baselines for biodiversity, soil health, and soil carbon. I am driven by happy cows and by seeing the impact we are having on improving nature on our farm. But it is the evidence of outcomes that brings people on the journey - both farmers and industry. Through mass adoption and support, we can have a bigger impact.
We welcome insights from across the farming community, including those beyond our membership. Lucy Noad is not an NFFN member. If you would like to share your voice, please get in touch: info@nffn.org.uk