LUXIMO® ON FARM: Tom Sewell
About Tom
Tom is a second-generation farmer at Sewell Farms, near Maidstone in Kent. The business is a family partnership between Tom, his wife Sarah, and his parents. The 100% arable enterprise runs a no-till farming operation across both their owner-occupied land and the areas they rent.
They are farming 560 ha including their own land and that of 17 landowners, all within a 6-mile radius of the home farm. This offers short-term security so building strong relationships is key, for example they take great care to look after the soil and the hedges on both their own and rented land.
Tom is probably best-known for his work on improving his farm’s soil health, having won Soil Farmer of the Year in 2021. The foundations of this were laid back in 2013 when he completed a Nuffield Scholarship which investigated regenerative agriculture using no-till systems. This opened his eyes to the potential benefits of no-till, and he was the first UK farmer to buy a Cross-Slot drill. Unsurprisingly, no-till, in combination with cover crops, has been a key strategy for this forward-thinking farmer in his battle against black-grass.
Tom was a Luximo® trialist in autumn 2021 and a Luximo® user in autumn 2022.
Black-grass
“About 10 years ago black grass became more of a problem,” says Tom. “We’ve employed a combination of strategies since then, a range of chemistry, no-till, cover crops, delayed drilling, spring cropping and spraying off flushes in between crops. I firmly believe that using all these things together is the way forward.
“Each year is different, so the goalposts are constantly moving. That means not only using all the tools we can, but being flexible in how we use them. It‘s essential to walk crops all the time and be prepared to treat each field individually.”
Rotation
Tom’s current rotation is first wheat followed by a break-crop of either winter beans or spring oats. Having experimented with a range of cover crops, he is now scratching the surface with a heavy rake in autumn to either grow a multi species cover crop or just to prompt volunteers to grow.
Where the black-grass is really bad we’ll do continuous spring crops until we’ve the upper hand,” he continues. “The oats are particularly good at smothering any black-grass.”
Autumn 2022
Good weather meant it was very easy drilling last autumn and Tom was able to get everything drilled up that he wanted and establishment was excellent.
He said, “We didn’t start drilling until the 10th of October, which is delayed drilling for us. We purchased a new drill in September, a Horsch Avatar, which is 12 m wide. It makes it easier to delay drilling if you know you have the capability to drill over 80 ha a day. That’s one of the reasons why we have this new drill.”
What’s happening on farm this spring?
A large percentage of black-grass land is going into spring oats. “Some has already been sown, it has had 3 round up spray offs, one in the autumn, one in February and another just before drilling, mid-April so that has hopefully knocked a lot of it off but populations are quite high.
As of the 24th of April, there are 75 ac of oats to go in and some other bits and pieces of stewardship. Delaying spring crops is part of our armoury too.
We’re pulling some winter beans out because they are full of black-grass so we are going to spray them off and put a cover crop in but that will probably be in mid-May.”
Tom’s top tips for black-grass control
- Delay drilling (of all crops!)
- Create as many stale seedbeds as possible
- Use competitive spring crops
