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Farmer Stories

Tom Edmondson - Building a resilient mixed farm from the ground up

England
Case Study
biodiversity
Crops
Diversification
Farming Champions
Livestock
Mixed
rotational grazing
Soil
soil health

When Tom Edmondson set out to secure the future of his family farm on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, he found the answers beneath his feet - in the soil. His journey into nature-friendly farming has built resilience from the ground up.

Cranley Barn Farms is a mixed farming operation situated eight miles from Milton Keynes, with one-third of its 300 acres dedicated to permanent pasture and the remaining two-thirds used for arable crops. Tom Edmondson is the third generation of his family to work the land, alongside his wife Mary.

Tom always knew he wanted to be a farmer, but when he left university in 2005 he was unsure about a career in the intensive indoor pig-rearing business on the farm at that time. Nevertheless, that was his entry point into the industry when he returned home in 2012. Then, in 2014, his arable contractor abruptly announced he was quitting, forcing Tom and Mary to make a snap decision. They took on the arable farming themselves.

Initially, Tom pursued the high-input, high-output model he had learned at university, but after a couple of years, he realised it wasn’t working. Blackgrass was becoming a persistent problem, and despite investing heavily in drainage, the land remained wet. Through his advisory work, Tom had learned about cover crops and decided to give them a try.

“There was one particular field we ploughed and the soil came up in solid slabs, with blackgrass sprouting along the furrows,” Tom remembers. “It looked like a hedgehog’s back. The soil was dark grey, wet clay. We were never going to get a spring crop in it.”

I realised that cover crops created a habitat for beneficial organisms to flourish, and this was something I hadn't done before because I was killing them off with chemicals and deep tillage.

Tom Edmondson

His first attempts at nature-friendly farming weren’t an immediate success. They allowed sheep to graze the initial cover crop too aggressively, which meant the crop was not terminated effectively when sprayed, leading to regrowth alongside the oats. However, despite the setback, Tom could already see signs of future successes, if he could learn to work with nature rather than against it.

“When we finally harvested that oat crop, the field with cover crops outperformed the neighbouring ones where I was still farming conventionally. I could see the difference, but with everything I’d learned about farming up to that point, I didn’t fully understand why.”

To move forward, Tom started reading about soil health and regenerative agriculture, with Nicole Masters’ book For The Love of Soil leaving the biggest impression. “She talked about soil and food webs and how the soil is a living system. I realised the cover crop had created a habitat for beneficial organisms to flourish - something I hadn’t done before because I was killing them off with chemicals and deep tillage,” Tom says. “I also realised that even with full inputs, my wheat yields didn’t justify what I was putting in.

Gradually, Tom realised that the best path forward for Cranley Barn Farms was to fully embrace nature-friendly farming. He began using a Claydon drill, which aerates the soil and serves as a useful stepping stone in transitioning away from conventional farming. In areas with the worst blackgrass problems, he chose to fallow the land, allowing soil health indicator species like bindweed to grow. “Some of my neighbours struggled with this,” Tom admits, “but it was important because it revealed that our alkaline soil had low calcium and phosphate availability, contrary to the soil sample results.”

The more Tom looked at soil health and the root causes of the farm’s challenges, the more he questioned mainstream agricultural models. “It felt like we were just on a treadmill, with no real control over anything,” he says. “We were effectively working for supermarkets and chemical supply companies, and I didn’t like it.”

“A more nature-friendly approach massively reduced our risk and exposure to crop failure because we were spending far less on what we were growing. Our output was lower, but so were our inputs, so our margins improved.”

Across the whole farm, chemical usage has dropped by up to 80%. Wheat crops that once received 250kg of nitrogen now get just 80kg, and some fields have been glyphosate-free for two years. Tom follows an arable rotation of two years of grazing crops, followed by two years of cash crops, mainly spring barley and winter wheat.

When I farmed conventionally, with high inputs, I wasn't proud of what I did, but now I am proud of how I farm. If we all farm in a way that benefits the soil, the entire system - from the ground up - benefits.

Tom Edmondson

Introducing livestock into the nature-friendly farming system didn’t happen overnight. In 2019, Tom and Mary opened a farm shop to help with cashflow, initially selling straw yard-finished pork and lamb from orphan animals they had bottle-fed. When a friend decided to sell his flock of breeding Jacobs, Tom took the plunge and bought them. They were soon followed by English Longhorn and Dexter cattle.

At first, they gave the animals 70 acres of river meadow, split into two large fields, and moved them back and forth intermittently. However, Tom noticed that the livestock spent most of their time around the trees and water troughs, leaving large areas of grass untouched and overgrown. From his reading, he knew the solution was to adopt regenerative grazing and move them daily.

“It was fortunate I was working with a fairly small group because they needed a large area,” Tom says. “We’d just gone cold turkey, cutting off the grass from its usual nitrogen and phosphate, so growth rates and palatability were low. It took a few years for the grass to recover and adapt to our system, but by the fourth year, it really started to sing. Now, the grass growth is phenomenal, the soil structure has greatly improved, and when it floods, the water no longer stands but it just soaks away.”

The animals have had a huge impact on the farm. The cows haven’t been wormed in two and a half years, antibiotics are only used in cases of difficult calving or lambing, and key species such as dung beetles and earthworms have flourished. The farm now has around 50 cows, including 15 that are calving and their followers, while lambing numbers are at about 50 ewes. 

Switching the farm shop’s focus from commercially produced meat to regeneratively reared meat - alongside Mary’s sourdough bread - has also paid off. “A good number of people who come to us know exactly how they want their food produced,” Tom says. “When we’ve taken them out to show them what we’re doing, they’ve loved it.”

The farm also runs a small off-grid Greener Camping Club site during the summer months. Looking ahead, Tom plans to introduce heritage wheat to the farm shop and transition to a disc drill to further reduce soil disturbance. He has also started making his own compost.

Biodiversity is also flourishing on the farm. It is home to kestrels and sparrowhawks as well as barn, tawny and little owls, while farmland species like skylarks, yellow wagtails and yellowhammers can be spotted. Two types of woodpeckers have been seen, and the river is home to kingfishers and otters.

Tom says that embracing nature-friendly farming and joining the community of regenerative food producers and consumers has positively impacted his wellbeing. “When I farmed conventionally, with high inputs, I wasn’t proud of what I did. But now, I’m proud of how I farm,” he says. “If we all farm in a way that benefits the soil, the entire system - from the ground up - benefits. It’s a cascade of positivity.”  

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