Herefordshire grower James Young is being paid to drill cover crops by his local water company, and he gets the added benefits of more friable and workable soils.

He receives nearly three times the cost of his cover crops seed from Severn Trent, which pays farmers to protect soils in areas of high risk of nitrate water pollution.

His enthusiasm for cover crops could also help him comply with new “public money for public good” subsidies being introduced, while helping with his desire to move to a more regenerative agriculture approach.

“The use of cover crops has helped improve our soils, especially the heavier ground, increasing organic matter and helping with field work,” he tells Farmers Weekly.

See also: Sheep and cover crops give a lift to yields and soil health

Cover crop payment

James Young in cover crop © MAG/David Jones

Mr Young is growing a five-species cover crop mix across 20ha of his lighter ground, and the water company is paying him £95/ha in an area where drinking water is extracted from boreholes.

The cost of his cover crop seed is £36/ha, and in addition to the payment, he receives the added gains that his cover crops will soak up any valuable nutrients in the soil, reduce nitrate leaching and then the crop will release nutrients back to the soil to benefit a following spring-sown crop.

He started growing cover crops in 2015, along with a move to increase his spring cropping area to help keep on top of any blackgrass, and this helped dovetail with his desire to move towards regenerative agriculture.

His current 20ha block of cover crops, grown on rented land just south of Ledbury, follows a spring wheat crop that was harvesting slightly later than usual, due to wet weather.

The straw was baled and carted away, and the cover crop direct-drilled in mid-September.

The five-way cover crop mix contains phacelia, berseem clover, oats, oil radish and vetch and was sown at 20kg/ha.

Crop emergence was slow due to a relatively dry September, but it soon grew away well following October rains to produce thick ground cover.

Heavy frost  

© MAG/David Jones

Mr Young had grown a previous cover crop on the same block of land ahead of the spring wheat, and that cover crop he managed to largely destroy by rolling in January 2021 at 3am in the morning with the aid of a heavy frost with the temperature down at -5C.

The stems of the frosted cover crop cracked under the roller and there was virtually no crop left in four weeks time.

This allowed him to cut the rate of glyphosate herbicide he used to 1 litre/ha as a quick clean up just before drilling the spring wheat, compared with a more normal rate of 3 litres/ha.

This season he is waiting for another very heavy frost to use his Cambridge rollers again, but if the weather is relatively mild he will have to apply glyphosate by mid-February at the very latest to get a good kill of the cover crop.

The following crop will be spring beans, so he is contemplating leaving the cover crop and drilling the beans directly into the green cover and then spraying off with glyphosate.

As a legume, beans can fix their own nitrogen so there should be little immediate need of nitrogen from the decaying cover crop.

His family farms 200ha of arable land at Hill House Farm, just south-west of Ledbury, using minimal tillage with no major ploughing undertaken for 20 years. 

Although he has no data to show yields have improved – with winter wheat averaging currently 8t/ha – the soils look and work better.

Flexible schemes  

This is the first season he has been paid for growing cover crops.

The scheme run by the water company has now become more flexible, as it offers a one-year deal that suits his farm rotation as the 20ha block is the only land eligible for the scheme.

He would have grown cover crops on the block anyway, but the extra financial support prompted him to grow a more diverse mix, including the legumes berseem clover and vetch, which will fix nitrogen from the air and so help the following crop.

Mr Young applied to put his 20ha block in the scheme back in January 2021, it was soon accepted, and his crop mix and area were checked in the autumn and then he received the financial payment in January 2022.

“The scheme was easy to apply, which is a help, and it encourages us to grow cover crops,” he says

The water company has been running its Severn Trent Environmental Protection Scheme (Steps) for a number of years, but has recently increase the financial rewards and has included both one- and five-year schemes.

Land chosen for the scheme must be next to a water body or have a known direct influence on a water body in close proximity.

Working with farmers

The company works with a large number of farmers running a range of schemes, such as paying farmers to create arable field margins and also paying livestock farmers for fencing off watercourses, and Emily Williams, catchment partnership agriculture adviser, says the cover crop scheme has been a success.

“We are looking to encourage as many farmers as possible to grow cover crops in the protected areas and prevent nitrates getting into the drinking water,” she says.

The cover crop scheme pays farmers £95/ha in the one-year deal, £120/ha/year in the five-year scheme and also offers a summer catch crop scheme paying £95/ha/year. There is a limit of £10,000/year for each individual farm.

The scheme for drilling cover crops in the summer of 2022 has been open since March 2021 and closes at the end of January 2022, and she suggests farmers look at the group’s website, or contact an adviser to see if their farms are in an eligible area. For the following year of drilling cover crops during summer 2023, applications open in April 2022.

The Severn Trent water catchment area stretches from Nottinghamshire and Shropshire in the North, down to Gloucestershire and Herefordshire in the South and West, and across to Northamptonshire and Leicestershire in the East.

Mr Young says cover crops will also help him comply with the new Strategic Farm Initiative of England’s Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme, which takes over from the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) this year.

He could be eligible for £40/ha offered as the “intermediate” level payment for the soil standard, which requires farmers to comply with a number of measure, such as regularly test their soils for organic matter and have 20% of their land in a multi-species cover crop over winter.

“We wish to go down a more diverse and regenerative approach and the growing of cover crops will help,“ he says.

Application for drilling cover crop in summer 2022 need to be completed by the end of this month (January 2022)

More information on cover crop destruction