As spring continues all around us, barrelling ever onwards towards summer, it is with a tinge of regret that I take my morning walks, the beauty of nature contrasted sharply against the to-do list tugging at my sleeve. I often return to my office in the mornings with a sense of duty, a moral incumbency to enact change and to be the idyll we so often envisage.
When I look at others’ farmland, I sometimes think to myself, “I love that piece of land more than the farmer does”, but this is slightly unfair. Farmers are bound by their profit margins and rarely can they deviate from the line so rigidly espoused by their seed/spray companies (I refer to these jointly as more-often-than-not this is a monopolised industry).
Trelonk on the other hand, has at its core, a sympathetic landowner and two managers hell-bent on reaching profitable agriculture in an entirely different manner to convention. This gives us the opportunity to set up a farm that works with nature, and not against it. I could wax lyrical for a month of Sundays about how we are going to achieve this but, if I may, I have one simplified example with which to illustrate my point.
We have sown two fields of the crop, Borage which famously, is a crop pollinated by organisms (as opposed to the wind) and it has been shown that placing pollinating bee’s in borage crops can achieve anything up to a 20% increase in yield. By leaving space in our borage fields for wildflower meadows, granted, we take land out of production and lose the potential crop value, but instead we get an environmental payment, plus the opportunity to provide for pollinators that may well help increase our yield as well (not too mention providing for a group of animals so widely impacted by the brutalism of 21st century agriculture).
