Farm of the Week: How seven years in Australia shaped Graham Potter's work on carbon-neutral The Grange at Rainton, near Thirsk

Australia has proved to be a massive inspiration to farmer Graham Potter whose arable enterprise at The Grange in Rainton is a carbon-neutral farm.
Graham Potter at The Grange in RaintonGraham Potter at The Grange in Rainton
Graham Potter at The Grange in Rainton

Working on a 15,000-acre farm for several summers, he then brought back what he had learned and put it into practice back home.

“I went to Esperance on the south coast of Western Australia in 2000 and didn’t experience winter in the UK again until 2007,” Graham said.

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“Farming in Western Australia has been the biggest influence in my agricultural life.

“The methods they were using led to me becoming a very early adopter of precision farming in the UK, understanding the benefits of direct drilling and variable rate applications.

“We have made great progress with our soil, we’ve been tested and we are a carbon-neutral farm. We never have bare soil and we are always working on our organic matter.”

Graham said as soon as soon as he finished with harvest and cultivation work in Yorkshire he would be on a plane bound for Australia and wouldn’t return until the spring.

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He was so inspired by the Australian way of farming that he now sends people out to learn the ropes, including his nephew Luke Knott who helps out on the farm.

“I learned so much out there and I thought that if they could use strip drilling in Australia, then we should also be able to put it into practice here.”

Graham, who recently won a Northern Farming award for his work with new technology, precision farming, soil improvement, wildlife enhancement and conservation, said he was also motivated by a realisation that the soil on The Grange was starting to deteriorate. Something, he said, had to be done.

“Our land wasn’t getting what it needed,” he said.

“We had been using normal nitrogen fertilisers but they weren’t doing their job. We found it was all about variable rate P & K, because it hadn’t been applied properly previously, and limespreading.

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“We now chop most of our straw to help with the organic matter in the soil, which has particularly helped with the worm count. Then drag the straw into the soil which assists with enriching it for the future. We’ve not ploughed a single field since 2012.”

Having taken on his first autosteer tractor in 2008 when he took over from his father Terry, Graham has been progressing his use of technology ever since.

“In 2013 I took on a Claydon drill. Its direct strip tilling technique was developed by farmers for farmers.

“It’s a one-pass system that saves a fortune and does not disturb the soil anything like the way ploughing does. I was part-ploughing up until then using a Combi drill.”

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Graham said he believes the results shown in both Australia and the UK show that precision farming is the way forward.

“The farm I worked on in Esperance has now grown to 36,000 acres and is all strip-tilled.

“Our yields across a varied land type from blow away sand to blue clay normally shows a healthy average of five tonnes per acre on first wheats, four tonnes for second wheats and two and a half tonnes per acre on Erucic oilseed rape.”

Everything on the farm is monitored and logged into the farm software system Gatekeeper.

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“Gatekeeper applies all of our yield maps, fertiliser maps and sprayer maps that provide us with our margin maps, which is important in view of our profitability.

“The maps show the areas of land where we make more return and the areas where we make a loss. Where the latter occurs in large areas of field, we will put the land into countryside stewardship, but our primary aim is to get the organic matter right whichever field it is.

“When we started looking after our soil on a scale of one to five we were at level one, we’re now at level four.

Having brought in analysts to look at the soil, since 2014, Graham said cover crops have been an “essential part” of his farming system.

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“Cover crops are something I have learned about since using them and they have a real part to play in the maintenance and enrichment of our soils. We now have what is called Pottermix that we use today and was designed by Kings Seeds who are based near Colchester. Normally we have just under 100 acres down to cover crops.”

The annual Deershed music and arts festival is held at a neighbouring farm to Graham and he keeps 23-24 acres, which is used for festival car parking and camping, in grass.

Other acreage is in countryside stewardship and sees him involved with bird mixes, bee mixes and beetle banks helping to enhance the wildlife population.

“We now have a pond area in what was a wet and unproductive corner of a field that we have left to nature.”

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The farm is very different to the one Graham’s grandfather, William Potter, ran and that his father Terry and his uncle Colin farmed together.

“My grandfather was very high up in his day and well respected,” Graham said. “The farm had pigs, sheep and cattle as well as arable crops. He employed a full-time joiner, a pig man, a shepherd and others too.”

But over the generations the livestock gradually disappeared.

“In the farm’s sheep heyday, we had a flock of around 500 ewes but we came out of sheep in the early 80s, after our shepherd passed away. We had breeding sows until the late 80s and calves that we reared to finishing until 1990. But by the time I left school the farm was all arable.”

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The days of having farm staff has also long gone with Graham having part-time and family help to run The Grange.

“When I was younger we had four full-time men on the farm so there was little need for me to do a vast amount.

“Now it’s just down to me. I have help from my nephew Luke with extra help one day a week and at harvest and drilling time.”