Co-operation name of the game for the Prudoms

There will be dyed-in-the-wool types who may shake heads in abject disagreement at this, but the facts are there for all to see as more farmers are turning to agronomists, soil surveyors, animal nutritionists and all manner of farm consultants in order to compete in current markets with supermarket pressures on prices having taken command and with concerns over trade post-Brexit.

Farmers’ 24/7 day-to-day experience of soil and toil clearly counts but there is more to today’s farming world than puffing out chests with pride and feeling that just because you’ve lived somewhere all your life and worked the land you have a divine right to be right.

Guy Prudom farms in a family partnership with his parents Peter and Christine. The Prudoms have farmed for generations. Peter and Christine live at Northfields Farm, Mickleby, near Saltburn, while Guy lives at Davison Farm, Egton on the edge of the North York Moors with his partner Victoria (Pitts).

The farms are tenanted from Mulgrave Estate including another, High Burrows, across the valley from Davison. The overall acreage is just over 1000.

Beef cattle from their suckler herd of just shy of 200 cows, arable cropping and grassland management make up the present family operation and next Friday they will be opening their gates at Northfields Farm to other like-minded farmers as part of the AHDB’s Best Practice scheme through the Strategic Beef & Lamb programme.

It is further evidence of how farmers are more prepared than ever to learn from each other and from industry professionals elsewhere. It’s not new either.

This kind of project has been taking place for some years and the farming world has embraced many developments. Guy and Peter haven’t stood still since he came back to join his father in 1994 after studying agriculture at Myerscough College and two years managing an outdoor pig unit in Oxfordshire.

“Dad started an 80-cow suckler herd while I was away and without his and my mum’s groundwork we wouldn’t be in the position we are today.

“I came back wanting to push the arable but we were in the wrong area to do that so we started to push the suckler operation more leading to acquisition of tenancies at High Burrows and Davison. We’d acquired other parcels of land and rattled away to 1300 acres but when headage payments came off and the Basic Payment Scheme came in 2005 we were quite badly under-stocked and made the decision to go organic across all grass fields and 200 arable acres at Northfields to feed the cattle.”

The Prudoms went organic in December 2007 but came out in 2015 due in part to losing additional land they had rented from another estate and partly due to the financial crisis affecting the organic food market. Guy feels their experiences with the sector were invaluable.

“What we learned by being organic was priceless, specifically with grassland management. We moved from ranching the farms to paddock grazing whereby the cows graze say a 10-acre field for four to five days and are then moved on to the next field, allowing three weeks for the field to recover before they return.

“It’s all tied up with making sure your soil is correct. We also found that the genetics in our herd weren’t as good as we would have liked. We’ve now started with Stabilisers and have 40 of them alongside 80 Simmentals, 40 Angus and 35 Beef Shorthorns.

“We calve in a 10-week window starting March 7 and we’re aiming to get it down to eight weeks. At Northfields, in addition to our cereals crops we also grow a lot of red clover that is a fantastic feed for the cattle as it is very high in protein.

“AHDB’s Strategic Beef & Lamb programme is about learning from each other whether through fellow farmers, scientists and consultants. We’ve had a consultant here, as a preliminary to Friday’s meeting, who has gone through every cost and how we currently go about our farming and we now have a baseline figure and we’re looking at where we’re heading in the future.’

“What we want to do is improve further our grassland management, get more of a handle on my costings and look again at herd genetics and cow efficiency. Analysing and improving these three areas against my baseline figure should then help with our bottom line.

“We might not be able to do very much about the outcome of Brexit negotiations from up here but we can at least set ourselves up correctly using the best information and experience we can.”