Category: Latest News

  • Member Insights: Sparham Hall Farm, Lyng

    The ‘straw’ harvest is over for another year – not much straw, though.  The winter barleys held up pretty well considering the severe heat and long drought; but the spring barley here was truly awful and I’m done with it for good. The maize will soon start to be harvested if heatwave number 4 goes…

  • Living Time Capsules

    Listen closely and you’ll hear the landscape whispering to you. It’s telling you a tale of time gone past, where horses were the main means of transportation and for agricultural work, where the land was worked by hand and communities banded together to get the job done. Look for the depression in a field to…

  • A deep dive into our soil

    Soil. A whole living world beneath our feet. The most important feature for a healthy planet – with healthy soil comes healthy plants, happy animals and thriving people. But how can we ensure our soils remain at their best whilst trying to grow a commercially viable annual crop and feed our communities? This was the…

  • An AGM with forward focus

    As we gathered for our AGM in a local village hall there was a real sense of optimism amongst Wensum Farmers. The meeting gave the normal run down of finances and the legalities but we swiftly moved on to a review of all the milestones we had hit in the last 12 months, took a…

  • Sennowe Estate: Trees, traps and timber

    Wensum Farmers, along with our friends The Ryburgh Wildlife Group were delighted to be invited to Sennowe Estate last Thursday evening for a walk and talk. Starting the evening in the main farmyard we were greeted with a massive sawmill enterprise and informed that 60% of the timber extracted from the Sennowe woodland, is used…

  • Crisp Malt

    Visiting our neighbours along the Wensum and understanding how we can better work together is always a positive and productive use of our time. Crisp Malt were kind enough to offer the Wensum Farmers a tour around their site. The aims being to better understand the malting process and to appreciate the lengths that Crisp’s…

  • Something to tweet about

    The majority of Wensum Farmers take part in the annual Big Farmland Bird Count hosted by the BTO, so to tie in with this national initiative, we ran an internal competition to monitor the status of some of our rarer farmland birds. The group were challenged to count the red listed birds on their holdings…

  • A way forward

    A Vision for the Future. A day filled with plenty of buzzwords and blue sky thinking but a much needed chat around a renewed purpose for the Wensum Farmers. Questions pertaining to where we want to be in 5 years time and what success will look like, mixed in with suggestions of collaborative hockey teams…

  • Winter ponding

    You associate January with the bleak midwinter, with new starts and resetting the clock on your personal goals, but what about conservation? Whilst the wildlife sleeps, the volunteers and farmers are busy maintaining one of the best biodiverse resources at their fingertips! Farmland ponds have been proven to be hotspots for life in the middle…

  • Navigating SFI

    Having spent the late Autumn and early Winter visiting Wensum Farmers members to determine what would be of use to them, a meeting of the minds was organised. We invited Norfolk FWAG to join us on a cold January afternoon to discuss the intricacies of SFI, Higher Tier and existing HLS payment schemes. Having started…