Back to the future with regenerative farming

Sometimes a good chat and a cuppa is all a farmer needs to boost the feed on his farm.

Before fifth generation Garston farmer Hamish Naylor started catch cropping with oats on his 400-hectare sheep and dairy grazing property six years ago, he hadn’t heard much about the practice, but he was interested in lifting his summer feed levels.

At the time, former Environment Southland land sustainability officer Dave Connor (now in the integrated catchment management team) was working with Hamish to map the farm as part of his Focus Activity Farm Plan. They got to talking over a cup of tea about different ways to improve the soils on the farm and reduce nitrate leaching.

“I hadn’t heard anything about it. I just thought it was a good idea to grow extra feed, because you’ve got your paddock sitting empty for basically three months, maybe four, depending. And this is a sheep farm, and sheep farmers are always short of feed,” Hamish says.

Following winter grazing on kale, Hamish hopped in his tractor with his chisel plough, ploughed the paddock and drilled with oats from the silo.

Only a few weeks after sowing he could see a difference.

“The soil changed colour. You could see the worms in it. The bacteria was gone. And we started to get better yields. Now, I’ve started growing barley and oats.”

Catch cropping hasn’t just been beneficial to the soils and stock, it’s helping the business as a whole. With tonnes of crop coming off the paddocks, Hamish decided to sell some to other farmers for summer feed.

“The income from catch cropping and dairy grazing has given the farm the equivalent of 40 years of development in one year.”

When he isn’t tending to his perendale sheep, ploughing and cropping or looking after dairy grazing, Hamish can be found tinkering on the farm.

He and his dad Peter Naylor have an on-site workshop where self-taught mechanic, Hamish, and his dad fix the tractors and build.

The Naylor family have been on their land since 1876 after leaving Bradford, England where they were wool merchants.

When they first started developing the property into the farm it is today, it was labour-intensive, back-breaking work consisting of smashing up rocks, smaller versions of which can be seen in the paddocks today, and tending to the stony soils.

“The grandfathers and the great uncles and all these old guys here used to grow black oats. Went to feed their hogs on it or ewes on it. Which would make it tiller out and then they’d lock it up and they’d get a crop of it and get a bit of yield. Used to fix the weed problem too.”

Hamish and his partner Sandra Welsh took over the farm from his dad 22 years ago and now he feels like he’s going back in time by connecting to his forefathers.

“It’s nothing new what I’m doing. The old fellas used to do this but not as big a scale as us. That is interesting, isn’t it? Following the family tradition there.”

Catch cropping

Catch cropping is the practice of planting a short-term crop between two main crops or during pasture renewal, primarily to capture and utilise residual soil nitrogen that would otherwise be lost through leaching or runoff.

It can also enhance soil structure and aeration, provide high-quality animal feed, and reduce sediment loss from the soil.

Back to the future with regenerative farming

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