Timble Ings

Saturday 31st May 2025

Leaders: Dr Vincent Walsh (am) and Laurie Wildwood (pm)

Seventeen of us squeezed ourselves into the small parking area in front of the farmhouse at Biohub Farm on this cloudy but dry day.

Dr Vincent Walsh joined us there. He is the Managing Director and Head of Farm Innovation at RegenFarmCo, who focus on scaling up regenerative agriculture across the UK, and Director of Decarbonisation at Levy, the sports and hospitality sector of Compass Group (a big food and beverage company), who are supporting the project, along with Quorn Foods and Yorkshire Water.

The Biohub Farm has been developed by RegenFarmCo and is their research and development site. It is also part of Beyond Nature, Yorkshire Water’s land strategy initiative.

Vincent, who is a tenant farmer of Yorkshire Water, took us on a guided tour of the farm and explained the many aspects of the project. He explained that they are looking at ways to gain multiple uses from the land and that this starts with the hydrology. He is trying to hold water on the landscape and has added 45 water features to the land. These include swales, which are wide ditches dug on contours which are used to move water around the landscape and to other water features, such as scrapes and ponds.

Vincent said they are looking into ways to allow farmers to keep sheep while also improving biodiversity. Many farmers are reluctant to part ways with sheep farming, seeing it as the traditional way of caring for their land. The aim is to see if sheep can be part of the ecosystem, but not the dominant force, by using mob grazing in a more complex ecosystem. Mob grazing is a form of rotational grazing that aims to mimic the behaviour of wild herbivores, although cattle are usually the preferred choice. Planting will take place on the raised earth banks of the swales, for example willows. These will be sacrificial, i.e., sheep will be allowed to eat them, in the hope that they won’t eat the production crops as much.

One of the fields is given over to a vermiculture system (using earthworms to convert organic waste into compost). Worms are added to silage from the site and other biomass from neighbouring farms. The compost is then added to the agroforestry area. The large area of agroforestry has, Vincent said, seven ‘layers’ to it, which include nitrogen-fixing species such as elder, fruit trees, comfrey (for green manure) and mint. A system of alley cropping means there will be grazing inbetween the rows of fruit trees.

Ten and a half acres of wildflower meadows are being created from seed collected from a donor site and there is a large coppice area, which filters water and provides shade for sheep and provides material for the vermiculture system.

Vincent left us at this point, so we thanked him for an extremely interesting tour of this fascinating project, and had our lunch in the coppice.

After lunch, Laurie led us on a walk through the woodland of Gill Becks below the farmland. A variety of water and woodland species were seen, including a beautiful and extensive stand of Wood Horsetail (Equisetum sylvaticum), Water Figwort (Scrophularia auriculata), Yellow Pimpernel (Lysimachia nemorum), Common Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis tetrahit), Lesser Spearwort and Greater Spearwort.

It was also a good afternoon for sedge revision, with several species being found, including Oval Sedge (Carex leporina), Common Yellow-sedge (Carex demissa), Star Sedge (Carex echinata) and Smooth-stalked Sedge (Carex laevigata). Laurie did a good job at explaining how to identify these species, as well as some grasses, such as Sheep's-fescue (Festuca ovina) and Velvet Bent (Agrostis canina).

We thanked Laurie for an enjoyable walk and retraced our steps back to the cars. It was a good way to end what had been a memorable day.

Text by Tom

Photographs by Susan