‘We started counting in 2005 with one pair and got up to 20 pairs in 2012, but it crashed with some bad winters,’ he says. ‘We now have a young keeper who carries out legal predator control and we went up to 72 pairs this spring.’
Mr Tufnell explains that, in his father’s day, the estate was continuous cereals: ‘Everyone did it round here when we went into the EU, but we can’t do the turnover of, say, Lincolnshire, and it struck me as not a great way to farm. When Dad died in 1995, it was the time of [the GWCT’s] Allerton Farm experiment and set aside. Now, practically every field has a margin, a strip for beetle banks and so on, and they really work. You put in a cereal mix with no sprays, allow broadleaf weeds to come up and it’s those seeds that the partridge eat.’
The farm is beginning to hark back to his grandmother’s day, with sheep and cattle (tenant farmed), arable rotation, cover crops, and wildflower meadows; it will be in Defra’s new Countryside Stewardship scheme and is part of a farm cluster. Mr. Tufnell says the thrust of his presidency will be ‘trying to end up with a [post-Brexit] transition without farmers going bust and getting people to understand that “sustainable farming” is about growing food.
Denne historien er fra November 17, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra November 17, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
