Our Farming Principles

Our Farming Principles

Our aim first and foremost is to produce good, healthy food which we are happy to eat and feed to our children straight from the fields. This drives all our decision making on a daily basis.

We want to be open about our farming methods, because we think everyone should know how their food is produced and make informed decisions about what they eat.

We subscribe to a system of farming called eco-agriculture,

which seeks to combine the best elements of organic farming with the best science of conventional agriculture.

The focus is on building soil life, fertility and structure, as the foundation for growing good food.

Unfortunately the term 'organic' is often abused in the agricultural industry and applied to produce which is far from it, so we avoid this label even where we could legitimately use it.

SOIL AND FERTILITY MANAGEMENT

Regular soil sampling is key, so that we can make informed decisions on how we manage our soils. We put enormous emphasis on the production of good compost and use it everywhere we plant (except baby carrots that don't like the organic matter!), but we also do use conventional fertilisers where needed, to keep our soils in balance. Where we use commercial fertilisers, we buy only the best products on the market from internationally recognised companies which have tested free of heavy metal contaminants.

Our experience has taught us that using compost alone does not produce healthy plants, and commercial fertilisers alone can quickly imbalance our soils and also fail to produce healthy plants. The best results always come when we combine the use of compost with commercial fertilisers to a prescribed program based on soil analysis. Crop rotation is also extremely important, and with the number of different crops we grow this is not hard to practice. We also rotate the vegetable production area with cereals and cover crops for long term soil health.

Planting wheat after a cover crop

reduces erosion and builds soil structure

Crop rotation

reduces disease and helps maintain balanced soils

Soil analysis

is key to informing our soil management

0AB661E5-E6A5-484A-B320-70C613475383.jpe

Compost produced on our farm

builds organic matter in our soils

C4A0A2BE-8828-4ACE-9F4B-A072F0E152D6.jpe

Sticky insect traps

help greatly to reduce our usage of agrochemicals

Insect mesh

protectively encloses our greenhouses as a physical barrier against pests

A1155524-08A1-4E65-81F4-0F2EFDD25A36.jpe

Floating row overs

keep our salads safe from hail and frost damage and protects against munchy rabbits and smaller pests

CROP HEALTH

Our first line against pests and disease is good plant variety selection, and our friends at Rijk Zwaan give us incredible support with this. We always have variety trials going on somewhere on the farm, and through Rijk Zwaan we have access to a global network of crop specialists.

Next is physical barriers. We were the first farm in the country to employ floating row covers to protect our crops from insects. Our greenhouses are also enclosed with insect mesh to prevent the entry of insect pests.

We rely heavily on the use of sticky insect traps and biological products (thanks to our friends at the Real IPM company) for our pest control on many crops, and spend a lot more time and money on these measures than we do on agrochemicals!

We do however use agrochemicals when necessary, but with three important provisions:

1. Agrochemicals are a last resort, where good fertility, physical barriers, traps, and biological control are not sufficient.

2. We only use products registered for use in the UK or Australia (as data for these countries is widely available online), and hold ourselves to the same standards as if we were exporting to those countries. This does limit us greatly on the products we can apply, and is more expensive than using other products on the market, but it gives us peace of mind that we are producing the safest food we can.

3. We make sure we adhere to the full pre-harvest intervals (that is, the prescribed time that produce may not be harvested after application of the product). This sometimes means throwing produce away we could otherwise sell. The most important factor for us is that our customers can always trust us and the products we supply. We are independently audited and have product periodically tested by a third party to hold us accountable.

We find that during the rainy season (December-April), pest and disease pressure is high and spraying for many crops is necessary. During the dry season and especially during winter (May-September), we get away with little or no spraying as pest and disease pressure is very low. We chose this area to start Masifio because of the excellent growing conditions during this part of the year.

WATER

Our farm is on a beautiful stream which is spring fed, and supplies all the water we need. As with our produce and soil, it is periodically tested for quality by a third party on behalf of one of our customers. We rely mostly on overhead irrigation, though we have drip line on the crops that prefer it. Our irrigation equipment is all fixed in place, and controlled by a computer which allows us to be very precise about the timing and quantity of application. This has advantages when it comes to disease control and fertility management, and allows us to get our seedlings off to the best start.

INTEGRATION

We have three main components to our farming operation; vegetables, mushrooms, and cereals.

How are these parts of our farming system integrated biologically?

It starts with the cereals. We grow 60Ha of wheat, rye and oats, and though we do sell some different types of flour, the main purpose of this is to produce enough straw to feed into our mushroom farm. The cereal production part of the cycle also gives us an opportunity to work on our soils, building fertility and correcting pH through liming, so that the fields are ready when we rotate in the vegetables.

We use the cereal straw as the basis for making our mushroom compost, and add to it chicken litter from a neighbouring farm, and gypsum. The process for making our mushroom compost is very precise, and is computer controlled in custom made bunkers. Using high pressure fans to keep it aerobic, it reaches temperatures of over 80degC. The finished product is a compost that is suitable for growing our button mushrooms, and goes into the mushroom growing rooms.

Once the mushroom production cycle is over (after about 8 weeks in the growing rooms), we then take the mushroom compost and put it in heaps on the far side of the farm (so disease cannot spread back to the growing rooms). Here we let it continue to break down for another 3-6 months, before taking it back to the vegetable fields to be used for planting our broccoli, salads, etc. During that time it becomes fully colonised by earth worms, which play an important role in building soil structure.

What starts as a wheat or rye stalk goes through our mushroom sheds and ends up as compost on our vegetables. The vegetable waste too ends up going into a different composting process, which then also goes back onto the vegetable fields.