Buckinghamshire & Bedfordshire Monitor Farm

Name:

Will MacLennan

Location:

Buckinghamshire

Farm sectors:

Cereals & Oilseeds

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About Buckinghamshire & Bedfordshire Monitor Farm

680 ha on Hanslope clay
243 ha contract farmed
Winter wheat, winter and spring barley, winter oilseed rape, and winter and spring beans
Currently a total of 740ha of combinable cropping across all farms
Dollars Grove is currently cropped on a six year rotation – 1^st wheat, W Barley, Oilseed rape, 1^st wheat, Spring Barley, Beans, with 2 year fallow and legume mix substituting barley and break crops on the lowest average gross margin fields
All grain stored centrally at Dollars Grove, 2200t of drying floor capacity and a further 2000t of flat store capacity
Will has land in the second year of Mid-tier Countryside Stewardship Scheme having completed 5 years of higher tier stewardship

Will Maclennan has been farm manager at Dollars Grove Farms Ltd since 2008, a heavy land farm (Hanslope series clay) based between Milton Keynes and Bedford. Dollars Grove Farms ltd also operates several contract farming agreements with neighbouring farms. Will’s role and focus at Dollars Grove are to make the arable business profitable in its own right, outside of income from diversification.

Will uses a hybrid system for an establishment that remains flexible depending on the year and soil conditions. Traditionally the farm was ploughed but slowly evolved towards rotational ploughing, with single-pass min-till cultivation. Mole ploughing is done on a rotational basis. Flatlift establishment is used for OSR. Will is experimenting with direct drilling, and the farm aims to establish half the area using regen ag techniques by 2024.

Why Dollars Grove Farm joined the Monitor Farm Programme

Will is keen during the farms tenure to look at improving soils and headland management
Learn more about good business management techniques and sharing good mental health practice
Getting the best outcomes from the environmental schemes being carried out on the farm
Continuing to challenge and adapt agronomy practices
To capture good metrics help with business performance

Will MacLennan, at Buckinghamshire & Bedfordshire Monitor Farm, discussing the summer launch event that took place in June #monitorfarm 🧑‍🌾@Cereals_EM

Find out about Will’s upcoming autumn events here:https://t.co/CEIJiGLrjp pic.twitter.com/fEXVpjpTN0

— AHDB Cereals (@AHDB_Cereals) July 26, 2022

For information about past meetings and events, click '+ See more'.

Past meetings and updates

How to make your business more resilient – 25 January 2023

At the final meeting of the winter 2022/23 season, Gary Markham (Land Family Business) talked to the group about the importance of understanding cost of production via benchmarking.

Gary specialises in setting up joint ventures, strategic growth, inheritance planning and succession. He walked through some case studies and detailed strategies to make businessess more sustainable.

Regenerative farming – 14 December 2022

Well known Cambridgeshire farmer Tom Martin discussed his experiences with regenerative farming practices, including his mistakes. Tom also touched on agripolitics, social media and Farmer Time.

Know your soils – 16 November 2022

Will’s update

Pleasing harvest despite the extremely dry conditions
Beans being brought back into the rotation has lead to a visible improvement in soil biology
Highest yielding crops were the ones that were sown early
Direct drilling and min-till featuring more and more on the farm but remaining hybrid
Will has been performing visual soil assessments to help inform cultivation decisions
Invested in a new drill which was used across the entire farm this year – fuel consumption reduced

Soils at Bucks & Beds Monitor Farm

In the lead up to this meeting, soil assessments had been carried out in several field at Dollars Grove using the Soil Health Scorecard. In the meeting, Anne Bhogal (ADAS) gave guidance on how to use the scorecard and interpret the results gathered. Anne then went into detail describing some of the ways you can go about improving soil health, touching on the importance of soil organic matter and potential benefits of implementing cover crops and having them grazed.

The results from the soil assessments at Dollars Groves were overall very positive. In the discussion that followed, links were made between the positive findings and the changes to rotation, drilling and cultivation mentioned by Will in his update.

Buckinghamshire & Bedfordshire Launch Meeting – June 2022

In the launch meeting at the end of June, Monitor Farmer Will MacLennan introduced the farm, discussed his plans and the challenges facing the business, and talked about why he had put himself forward to become the new monitor farmer in the region. During the farm tour afterwards, Will showed the group a range of the farm’s current cropping including a detailed look at some of the soils.

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