TOM Sewell has put his money where his mouth is and now he’s encouraging others to follow him down the route towards no-till farming.

The second generation arable farmer from Maidstone in Kent laid out his stall at the Northern Farming Conference held at Hexham Mart.

He said: “We have not ploughed on our farm for 16 years.

“If you can grow a good crop, it makes sense that there is nothing wrong with the roots and the soil. Why is it then that every year we feel the need to rip that soil up?

“The only real difference is a small amount of stubble and so I would urge all farmers to ask themselves if ploughing is not just a cosmetic function.”

A minimum tillage approach might not be as attractive as a ploughed field, he said, but the reality is it could improve soils, yield and profitability, while saving the hard-pressed farmer valuable time.

Less than seven per cent of the world’s crop land is farmed using no-till methods. Of these 236 million acres, around 85 per cent are in North and South America and they support some of the most successful farms in the world.

Keen to find out if they held the blueprint for producing the 60 per cent growth needed in food production by 2050 to feed the forecasted 9.6bn global population, Tom gained a travel award from the Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust.

He told the Northern Farming Conference delegates about the conclusions he has drawn in his final report to the trust, Moving from Sustainable to Regenerative Agriculture using No-Till systems .

In it, he says he first began mulling over the matter after comparing the 10-inch deep ruts still evident on his family’s farm in the spring following the deep cultivation the previous autumn with the channel just two inches deep left where they had been through with a disc roller. It set him thinking.

Then the many hours he spent applying fertilisers and fungicides gave him time to think some more about why he ploughed in the first place – because he invariably ended up with fields in the same state they’d been before he started, just with all the residue buried.

He said: “My conclusion was that the entire process, if the soil was in a good condition, was for the benefit of the drill and its inability to sow directly into the previous crop’s stubble. This was resulting in many cultivation passes.”

These were operations that took place at a very busy time of the year, using expensive machines burning diesel and wearing out metal, not to mention the man-hours that had to be paid for.

His research took him off to America, Paraguay, Brazil, Australia and, of particular interest to him, New Zealand. There he met the designer of the cross-slot no-till drill he and his family eventually imported in kit form to assemble on their own farm.

Dr John Baker has 40 years’ experience of no-till and New Zealand’s climate and soils are comparable to Britain’s.

Besides the savings in the cost of crop establishment, Tom also learned all about the benefit to soil too. As he points out in chapter eight of his report, the quality of a farmer’s soil is both the beginning and the end of the story.

He said: “So often in modern agriculture we spend thousands of pounds growing a crop – thinking primarily about the needs of the crop and what it requires. This is in order to deliver us a high yield with a quality premium.

“We throw fertiliser at a growing crop, then spray it with a vast array of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides and possibly a tiny bit of manganese and growth regulator.

“But all these products are targeted at the growing crop rather than the soil in which it is growing.”

The most successful no-till farmers pay particular attention to improving the organic matter percentage of the soil, the structure and the amount of active biological life, such as worms, fungi, bacteria and root structures.

These farmers are finding that, after a few years, their soil has improved to such an extent that they are able to not only reduce the amount of nitrogen fertiliser required to give the same yield, but that most of them have also stopped using artificial P (phosphorus) and K (potassium) fertilisers altogether.

Many farmers didn’t link the effect cultivation has on the stability of their soils with their ability to resist erosion.

He said: “A no-tilled soil will have a structure plus a network of roots and worm holes that not only holds soil together, but also gives it an in-built drainage system that results in higher water infiltration rates, firmer soil which carries traffic better year round and a soil that has mulch and ground cover year round.

“This prevents rain from hitting bare soil and causing compaction and run-off, which is the start of soil erosion.”

If farmers can prevent topsoil from being blown or washed away, while improving its quality by retaining residues, then surely they will end up with higher yielding crops with the same or less input, he said.

Another benefit that has been posited needs further investigation – that grass weeds could be severely reduced or even eliminated using a low disturbance, no-till drill.

“If this is true, no-till could result in the knockout punch in the fight against blackgrass,” he said.

Tom has paid tribute to the Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trust that enabled his research. The report he submitted can be read on his family’s website at sewellfarms.co.uk