Episode #76: Tim Parton

Regenerative Agriculture Podcast

AEA Marketing

Earth Sciences, Science, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2021

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tim Parton is a regenerative agriculture advocate and Farm Manager at Brewood Park Farm in the United Kingdom. Tim has been implementing regenerative practices on his 300-hectare estate for over 15 years. He has received several accolades for his work, such as being named the Arable Innovator of the Year by British Farming Awards and receiving the Farm Innovator of the Year award from Farmers Weekly.

Throughout their conversation, Tim and John discuss:

Tim's background and retreat from intensive pesticide use.
How balancing plant nutrition helped Tim cultivate canola seedlings that are resistant to flea beetles.
Tim's experience with Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus (or BYDV) and how he manages aphids in an ecological system.
Foliar application systems and their economic impacts.
Increases in commodity fertilizer prices and what this means for the financial viability of regenerative agriculture.
How Tim has managed to not apply any NPK fertilizers for more than a decade.
The cultural management practices that have replaced fungicide applications on Tim's farm.
The importance of carbon sequestration, educating consumers, and sharing information among growers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi friends, this is John and this is the regenerative agriculture podcast where we talk about the
0:05.0	agronomic sciences and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health,
0:10.9	and farms financial health, as well as ultimately public health, and we can have conversations about growing really healthy food.
0:17.8	My guest for this episode is Tim Parton, who is a farmer in the UK. Tim has been on a really
0:25.4	interesting journey for some time adopting regenerative agriculture practices and principles.
0:29.6	Tim, thank you for being here with us today. I'm really excited to learn more about your story and the journey that you've been on.
0:36.6	Can you tell us a little bit about
0:37.9	your farming context? What's the climate like? What crops are you growing? And what has your
0:42.9	journey been like on your operation over the last decade or so? Thanks, John. Well, it's a pleasure.
0:47.3	It's always nice to spread the word. My journey probably started in 2009, but I'd always had an interest in soil really prior to that
0:56.4	and I could never understand how farmers could abuse the one attribute that they relied on the
1:03.2	most and yet it was always left till lasting quite often the cases so from 2009 I started to
1:09.2	go down the stripped till roots and my soils jumped when numbers came forward and things started to work.
1:15.6	By 2015, I realised I was still moving too much soil in my mind.
1:19.6	I'd got very interested in biology by this time.
1:22.6	I'd started playing around using biology in 2012 and I'd had some fantastic results.
1:30.3	So in 2015 I made the jump just to direct drilling and the big thing for me there was being
1:36.3	able to get biology down next to the seed so I adapted the drilled straight away to be able to do that.
1:42.3	These days I farm pretty much without fungicides.
1:45.8	I'm a total believer if we get the nutrition right, the plant won't get ill. If that plant's balanced,
1:51.9	disease pests just won't look at it. If they do, I will still use biology to take control of
1:58.0	disease coming into that plant. But the biology really is a result
	...

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