What is Regenerative Farming?
Regenerative farming is about working with nature. It means enhancing soil health, increasing biodiversity, and promoting ecosystem services like water purification and carbon capture. Orchard Farm embraces this approach through its diverse habitats—wildflower meadows, wetlands, orchards, and herbal pasture leys.
The Benefits: From Healthier Soil to Happier Wildlife
By practicing rotational grazing and maintaining wildflower meadows, Orchard Farm ensures that its soil remains healthy and full of life. Diverse plant species not only feed the sheep but also provide habitats for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife. The farm’s wetlands help to manage water naturally, reducing flood risks and creating habitats for species like frogs and water shrews.
Always Learning
However, it is not a perfect science or an seamless transition to a new system. Keeping the sheep well is a huge part of our day to day management. Shepherding requires a slow daily walk amongst the sheep, always looking for sore feet, fly strike or signs of worm burden. Blow fly strike is especially devastating, flesh eating maggots set to work in warm, damp fleece, overwhelming sheep within hours. Reducing synthetic applications is a huge aim for us. Dung beetles help with worm burdens and starlings, swallows and swifts with fly populations, so why continue to apply preventative treatments? Well, in a landscape where baseline populations of flora and forna (which provide these ecosystem services) have reduced there is a balance to strike with a carefully timed single application of flystrike prevention to maintain animal welfare. With a rising baseline of fly munching bats and birds, a considerately timed shearing (or two) we can tip the balance and work towards a completely chemical free system.
