Series 6 Episode 10 - Martin Lines and Nature Friendly Farming at Scale

And, you know, for someone who thinks nature-friendly farming, I've just driven down your drive and been confronted by big tractors, big machinery.

So you're not kind of anti-machinery, are

you? Oh, very much.

And I love my tech and that.

So we use satellite-controlled machinery, satellite imagery.

nutrient mapping to within half hectare or within an acre or half acre so we use all the data we can but also value nature uh in the landscape for improving my resilience reducing my costs and actually what we've got to do is have that science research to actually help me understand how much nature do i need what is it doing is it helping me or hindering me and i've gone kind of gone on a journey the last 10 years of sort of having research done here, been going out to other meetings, looking at research or sort of What do pollinators do for what predatory insects years ago, I went to college where we were taught to kill things and, and focus on increasing yield and productivity and grain and livestock, not, not environment and nature.

And I've kind of purposely made myself go and go to, in the early years, go to organic events and understand how they're farming organically.

And I'm traditional conventional.

What do we mean by conventional? I'm an input pesticide input farmer was a heavy.

That's a side input farm.

And I'm moving that away now, or backwards.

But it's like, okay, so those beetles I see, they eat my slug eggs.

So if I can be habitat that makes that work, that's win-win.

And if I can get more pollinators, and I actually started seeing the evidence on our farm of... where we've got the flower margins those creeping into the the creepy crawlies going into the field eating the aphids and it's just switch on movements that and also if i can get paid for some of the habitats that make me an income stream that underpin my production it's a win win win all the time and actually we are quite windy here yeah if we walk down this side then yeah

So this is interesting, because I think often we talk about nature-friendly farming as if it's a sort of nature or farming.

This is quite patently, you know, these are regular fields.

They're laid out.

They're square or rectangular.

This is a conventionally managed farm in terms of what you might see to start with.

And then you realize, actually, you're letting your hedgerows grow out.

You've got blackthorn entering the fields.

You've got these lines down the middle of the fields.

which look like, are they

beetle banks? So if we just stop here then, so we've got beetle banks on the edge, but what we've got in the middle of the fields, every 90 or 120 metres, because we're a 30 metre wide biggest machine, is flower strips.

We have a six metre wide, one metre tusty grass either side, four metres of flowers up the centre.