Farm of the Week: Innovative approach sets beef farmer Doug apart from the crowd

Not a bit of it. He has the approach of one who has been well schooled in the nature of agriculture and with a combination of new business strands that he has developed in recent years including an innovative approach to beef farming, an increasing trade in grain drying and storage, plus a fledgling arable contracting concern, Doug isn’t letting any proverbial grass, black or otherwise, grow beneath his feet.

“You’ve got to have some pain on, whether that’s having invested heavily as we have in new kit such as the Perry grain dryer or whether it is calculating how long we dare leave the 200 acres of wheat we still have to start for next year. If you don’t have some kind of pain then you won’t do anything and that usually means you end up going backward rather than forward.”

It’s not all bad news for Doug and while industry awards - more about which later - don’t necessarily translate into cash they do point to a farm that isn’t just thinking about its future but is actively engaged with doing something about it.

The family’s farmed acreage runs to around 850 acres of predominantly cereal crops and a further 30 acres of grass at Osgodby Grange, a block at nearby South Duffield and a farm recently taken on at North Duffield. They own 750 acres. The farm has grown from the 550 acres since Doug returned in 1991 after having studied Askham Bryan College.

Following a poor harvest this year he is planning on 250 acres of winter wheat for 2017 growing the varieties Evolution, Relay and JB Diego. He’s dropped Grafton that failed to impress.

“We have a good spread of land from strong clay to sand but most of the wheat was on strong land this year and it had its feet in water for too long. It came home at best around 2.75 tonnes an acre whereas last year it was over four tonnes.”

Winter barley that produced over three tonnes an acre will be grown across 140 acres for next harvest and once again Doug is going with the variety Volume. Spring Barley will be grown on 100 acres after a cover crop. Oilseed rape will take up 135 acres and there will be 118 acres of maize for forage, anaerobic digesters and grain maize to be crimped and treated to give the bulls the starch and energy they need. He’s also growing a hybrid rye this time.

“We’ve grown maize for ten years now, ever since we finished with sugar beet when the York factory closed. One of the major growth areas in our contracting business since we started six years ago has been maize drilling. We’re kitted up to do almost everything and now drill over 450 acres of maize a year.

“The new grain dryer handles 25 tonnes per hour and is state of the art equipment that along with the storage capacity and weighbridge we’ve also installed puts us in an ideal position for both contract drying and storage for others. We already have two or three customers but we’d be delighted to show other cereal growers how well it works.”

Contracting doesn’t just mean working with crops at Osgodby Grange. Doug sees their livestock role as beef cattle contractors. He believes their unique approach to cattle finishing will be adopted elsewhere in the future.

“There wasn’t a lot of margin to be had in traditional beef farming so far as we were concerned. We’d done all sorts of things over the years. Our business in cattle today means that none of the cattle here belong to me and are all farmer-retained. It’s the start of our beef season now and we will take up to 600-700 head of cattle from farms where they have had a year at grass. They come to us for a 90-day quick finish. They will normally be around 18-20 months old and at around 550 kilos. We will bang on the extra 100 kilos to get the cover that the likes of Woodheads and Dovecote Park are looking for.”

Once the 90-day cattle, a mix of steers and heifers, including Aberdeen Angus, Charolais and a number of other breeds have reached their target weights the next phase sees mostly Stabiliser bulls coming in to Osgodby Grange in November and being taken to around 620 kilos. It’s a longer process that takes Doug’s cattle season up to May/June leaving the yards free during harvest.

“We have developed a strong customer base of Stabiliser bulls from the Lleyn peninsula where they have the grass and a great expertise with suckler cows in building up the breeding herds. What they want rid of are the bulls so we get them at around five months when they’re at 350 kilos. Once again we fill to capacity with around 600-700 predominantly Stabilisers, but we do take others. We make a point of keeping all customers’ cattle separate and that means the pens vary from holding 20 to 120. Our charges are a fixed daily rate per beast plus a feed cost.”

The feeding is a major driver in why more customers are coming to Doug and why he won an Innovator award last year and has been nominated as Beef Farmer of the Year in the Farmers Weekly this year.

“We’re probably ahead of the game and in ten years I can see everybody doing it this way with breeding and finishing specialists. There have always been finishers but not generally where the breeders retain ownership of the stock.

“What both the breeders and processors find particularly useful from us is that we provide them with complete information on what has been fed. For the breeders they can then use the feed conversion statistics to see where they would be better taking their breeding programmes.”

Doug is a fourth generation farmer at Osgodby. His great grandfather came here in 1919.