Moor Farm, near Shiptonthorpe: Agricultural enterprise that moves with the times

The marathon starts at 6pm on the Friday evening and will finish on Saturday evening. The club are running a sweepstake to guess at how many acres get ploughed in that time and there’s a barbecue, lots to do and see, including new farm machinery on display by local dealers.

“Club Chairman Tom Bulmer who farms at Holme on the Wold; club secretary Chloe Bishop and Chloe’s twin sister Jasmine are all involved,” says Ollie.

Ollie describes Moor Farm as ‘a heavy slab of clay on top of the Wold’ and is a farm where he has never been afraid of change, which currently sees him with not a single traditional cereal or traditional break crop such as oilseed rape in the ground.

“In 1996 mum and dad gave me the opportunity of a lifetime when they bought a little farm back down on Exmoor, and moved back to where I was born, and left Moor Farm in my hands.

“I’d been working at home since leaving school at 16 and was in my early-mid twenties when I took over.

“Mum and dad had set up a small pig breeding unit which they had decided to close in the 90s. When I took over we started doing pigs on a bed and breakfast arrangement for Richard Longthorp at Howden. I was the second yard he took on and I’ve been with the family ever since. I now work with Anna Longthorp managing Anna’s outdoor unit of free range, all top spec pigs, as good as you get.

“When they reach point of sale we pick the whole batch up, they come to Moor Farm and I select them for sale. During summer I drive the combine for Jonathan Longthorp, or I’m filling in, leading straw or corn. Whatever role needs filling, I fill that role.

Moor Farm is a relatively small farm so for a short while Ollie had an arrangement with another local farmer, which proved relatively successful and which brought about his next venture.

“There was quite a lot of grassland that came with the other farm and so, having grown up with sheep, I ended up with a few more and we had 250 ewes. Things evolve, things change and that farming strategy came to an end, but around the same time I was offered an awful lot of grazing on another local estate for several years and upped my sheep numbers peaking at 2200 ewes.

Ollie’s zest for helping young people was encouraged by approaches from colleges and universities seeking to give veterinary students on-farm experience.

“For the next 8-9 years I’d have first and second year vet students, schoolchildren, fifth formers, all thinking about a career in being a vet or in veterinary medicine, and I ended up with over 40 vets that have come through what could be called the Ollie Heywood School of Lambing.

“I have been so privileged and happy to come across so many brilliant young people who have something about them and want to go places and even more privileged to have my indispensable right hand man Chris Harrison who’s been with me 25 years.

Having grassed everything down, when sheep numbers went so high, in order that he had lots of forage for hay and silage, things changed again. Ollie came out of sheep, then ploughed everything out and began growing winter wheat again.

“Jonathan helped me with that and we had a couple of remarkable years, as the fields had all benefited from being in grass for several years and the soil condition was good.

“But Moor Farm, as the name suggests, is not a particularly good farm. When we had a borehole put in for water for the pigs it went through 16 metres of clay before they hit rock. It is not an easy farm. It’s a great big blob of clay.

“Two years ago we heard the whispers of the new Sustainable Farming Incentive, researched it, and for the land type at Moor Farm it’s a no-brainer.

“We are also in a countryside stewardship scheme. I don’t want to say I’m a raging environmentalist but one of my pet hates is seeing hedges flailed to pieces in autumn because in one fell swoop you’ve destroyed all of the winter feed of such as hawthorn berries, rosehips and sloes. There’s no winter benefit for any birds in that.

“I’d much rather see grass margins around the fields and bigger more natural hedges. It’s far better for all native birds and groundnesting birds. It’s just a far richer environment and guess what, Countryside Stewardship grants just work to allow us to put margins in and not compromise the actual growing space of the field, the actual cash generating bit.

But Ollie’s cash generating bit now all currently comes from his stewardship and SFI work.

“We now have 44 acres of permanent pasture of which 38 acres is in an overwinter bird feed scheme – and all the rest is in overwinter bird feed on the arable land. There is no traditional cash crop on this farm at the moment.

“It all feels very peculiar but we’re a business and this is a way of ensuring we have an income. In some ways it does feel a bit wrong, but I still think a lot of farmers really do not understand soil. They think it is brown stuff that plants grow in and fail to realise that soil is full of insects, fungus and bacteria and that every time you put a piece of steel through it, it destroys what is there, that then takes time to rebuild.

“I looked at the SFI scheme early on and thought ‘where’s the catch?’ It’s guaranteed money for the right reasons. It has been the first time when there has been any government-backed scheme related to soil.

Ollie hasn’t ruled anything out in terms of which way the farm will go in the future.

“It could be that I go back into cereal crops or end up grassing the rest of the farm again, I could start with sheep again or provide grazing for others.

Market Weighton YFC Ploughing Marathon & Family Fund Day takes place at Moor Farm on Saturday 10 May, when Ollie says he and his partner Carole will welcome all to a farm that keeps moving with the times.

“This is a real opportunity to come, plough, use vintage tractors, have a fun day and celebrate a great organisation, the young farmers.