Wainfleet Monitor Farm

Name:

Gary Willoughby

Location:

Lincolnshire

Farm sectors:

Cereals & Oilseeds

Twitter:

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About Wainfleet Monitor Farm

Primrose Farm has been a Monitor Farm since June 2020
The farm features arable cropping and contract spraying and combining
Crops include: wheat, barley, oilseed rape, beans and peas
Soils are clay and marshy, with siltier soils towards the south

Based 7 miles inland from Skegness, second-generation farmer Gary and his wife Debbie oversee 75 hectares of owned land, as well as some tenanted and contracted land. The pair juggle the dual roles of growing the business while bringing up a young family.

Gary and Debbie are interested in collaboration, shared machinery and succession. They would like to explore ways to improve soil health and trial new cultivations to move away from an entirely plough-based system.

Wainfleet Monitor Farm will run from 2020–24.

For information about past meetings and events, click '+ See more'.

Past meetings and updates

Grain marketing strategies – 21 February 2023

For the final meetings of the winter 2022/23 season, members of the AHDB market analysis team visited Wainfleet to discuss grain marketing, the effect of input costs on margins, and what top performing farms do differently.

You can keep an eye on cereal and oilseed markets with daily updates from AHDB, here.

Crop nutrition – 17 January 2023

Guest speakers Phil Burrell (Yara Product Manager) and Paul Davey (Soil Farmer of the Year 2019) gave talks linking soil and crop nutrition. The pair touched on nitrogen use and efficiency, sulphur, potash and foliar/soil application of nutrition.

You can find links to download all seven sections of AHDB's Nutrient Management Guide (RB209), here.

Business resilience – 13 December 2022

At this meeting, Gary Markham (Land Family Business) drew on his experienced knowledge of benchmarking data to give the group advice on understand their costs of production. He used case studies from previous clients and explored diversification options.

Assess your business resilience independently using AHDB's Farm Business Review Tool.

Review and regenerative farming – 13 December 2022

Gary was joined by Tom Martin (Well-known cambridgeshire farmer also known as ‘Farmer Tom’) who spoke about his experience with regnerative agriculture, including his mistakes. Tom also discussed agripolitics, social media, Farmer Time, and more.

Summer farm walk – 15 June 2022

The 2022 summer meeting at Primrose Farm had a packed agenda, items included:

Monitor Farm update - revisitng priorities and gaugeing progress
Farm walk viewing crops, buildings and machinery
Discussion of Farmbench data
Group discussion regarding current rotation and changes to make for the following season (2022/23)

Environmental management update – 25 February 2022

Barney Parker (Ashfield Farmed Environment Services) gave update on ELMS and SFI, Farming Rules for Water and other legislation worth knowing about. Becky Wilson (Farm Carbon Toolkit) was also in attendance to give an overview of all things carbon and walk through the results of a carbon footprinting exercise that took place at Primrose Farm.

Machinery decisions for your business – 14 January 2022

During the winter season, a Labour and Machinery review was conducted at Wainfleet by Brown & Co..

The results were then discussed with Harry Henderson (AHDB Techinal Knowledge Exchange Manager), who compared the findings to other Monitor Farms in the programme.

Soil and crop nutrition – 6 December 2021

With guest speaker Pete Berry (ADAS), this meeting explored the links between soil and crop nutrition. Focussing particularly on how to maximise economic optimum yields and quality.

Managing soils for better productivity – 9 November 2021

Anne Bhogal (ADAS) talked about what soil health means, why it is important, and what can be done to improve it. Anne began by giving a demonstration of how to assess soils using the AHDB Soil Health Scorecard. She then went on to discuss the findings of the soil health review already completed at the monitor farm in the autumn.

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