Farm of the Week: Getting right down to the roots of productive land

He arrives with a spade over his shoulder, turns a clod and starts talking. A lump of earth and grass holds a dozen clues to a farm's problems.

The arable farmer would understand. The dairy farmers are catching on. But many grassland farmers still do not think below ground level.

Mr Paul was one of them, but has had his own consciousness raised, and is employed by Farmway, a big farmer-owned supplies company, to spread the word.

His own farm is a typical Dales tenancy, with most of its 540 acres running up and over the steep sides of Littondale, off Wharfedale, from 750ft up at the farmhouse, in Arncliffe, to 1,000ft on the tops.

The stock is Lleyn sheep and Welsh Black cattle. The 280 ewes are prolific, mainly from Lleyn tups but with the odd Charollais or Texel contribution – multiplying themselves by 205 per cent at scanning time and 190 per cent at weaning, after losses.

The cattle, centred on 30 sucklers, were chosen when the park authority offered 30 a hectare for specified native breeds, to vary the grazing patterns in 'limestone country'.

Now the incentive has been absorbed into Higher Level Stewardship and altered to mean there is better money for 'rare' breeds. That is slightly exasperating for Mr Paul, who has put some effort into a commitment to the Welsh Blacks – including a mail-order service for freezer packs, via www.yorkshirebeef.com/

Kilnsey Trout Farm also sells some.

The Farmway job is Mr Paul's main employment. The home farm has to be fitted around it. "They call me the midnight farmer," he says, not entirely joking.

Now 43, he was brought up in North Wales, ran sheep as a teenager, studied farming at Aberystwyth and then spent two years Down Under on a scholarship.

He came back and got a job selling feed, which he swapped for a similar one in Yorkshire when he decided to marry Sarah from Skipton. They rented their first 100 acres at Arncliffe in 1990 and have had three daughters and a son there. The eldest, Megan, just through A levels, was born blind and Mrs Paul has been kept busy as a full-time mother. In the interests of a steady income, her husband moved into the Farmway job 14 years ago – and began to learn while he earned.

It was through watching other farmers burn their grass with bedding muck that he learned to compost his in the farmyard. It was through selling soil aerators that he became a convert and bought his own. And it was through Farmway's link-up with Roullier, an international fertilisers specialist, that he came to understand soil nutrition rather than simply selling it.

He is now full-time on grassland solutions. The hole-reading is part of the initial free consultation. The farmer can then pay for soil sample analyses, at 20 each, which should confirm and add to the initial diagnosis. After that, there are prescriptions for sale, of course. But the pitch is that because the prescriptions fit the patient, they are cheaper in the long run than the standard NPK mixes.

Most will include calcium – "the king of nutrients". The decline of the liming tradition has been expensive for farming and the environment, according to Roullier and Farmway.

Every point down from 7 on the Ph scale for soil multiplies the acidity by 10 and has a proportionate effect on the availability of nutrients – and, therefore, on how much fertiliser goes to waste and how much might leak into waterways. The Government and the European Union are increasingly insistent on soil testing and improvement planning – and vets are looking at a weight of evidence that many ailing animals are simply getting bad grazing.

Mr Paul sums up: "Grass does not eat organic matter, whether it is manure or dead leaves and roots. It eats minerals.

"And it is worms and bacteria which change one to the other. They require alkaline soil and they also require aerated soil. If your worms are grey or blue instead of pink, they are not getting enough oxygen. Compaction starts as soon as ploughing is over. That is why the performance of a ley drops year by year."

Half of his 50 in-bye acres, alongside the River Skirfare, are protected from "improvement" by HLS conditions. They will do for growing lambs but not for fattening. On the other 25 acres, he is following his own advice and watching the contrast.

One meadow has been aerated three times in 18 months. At first, he left one half still compacted, and watched as the sheep unanimously went for the grass on the other side. He digs a sod to demonstrate what has happened .

"It looks like Father Christmas's beard, and that is good. The tap roots are for water. All those feathery white whiskers are what pick up the nutrients. The deeper they go, the sweeter the grass. If you force-feed nitrogen without paying attention to the roots, your grass comes up full of water instead of sugars."

He has reseeded the good pastures with juicy ryegrass. His low-maintenance pastures, where the soil has never been rejuvenated, are naturally full of buttercups, dandelions, cowparsley, daisies and old grasses like Yorkshire Fog, Meadow Fescue and Cocksfoot.

Richard Paul won first prizes for hay and haylage at Kilnsey Show. He is on 07801 010107.

Richard's home farm recipe

"I use the products I sell because I have always known that you have to put back what you take out.

"Take a cut of silage off a field and you remove 32 units of phosphate per acre and 100 of potash.

"Graze it and you lose 16 of phosphates but no potash, because the manure puts something back.

"I use Nutrigrass before the growing season at a ballpark cost of 24 an acre.

"It's a mix of urea and ammonia – which gives you slow-release nitrogen – with quite a lot of sulphur and some sodium.

"Around November, I replenish the soil where I have cut for silage with Maxicut, a 0/10/25 mix with trace elements and calcium, along with muck.

"For the grazing pastures I don't need the potash but I use Physalg 15 to replace the phosphates. I spend about 30 an acre on both of those.

"It takes five kilos of cake to put a kilo on a lamb and at 180 a tonne, that is 90p.

"With grass, you can do the job for half that."

CW 4/9/10