Meet an Organic Dairy Farmer

Mosshayne Farm used to be a tenancy on a the large Poltimore Estate and when this was broken up about 100 years ago my great grandfather, as the current tenant farmer, was given the chance to buy the farm. The family has been farming here ever since, always with Fred in the name somewhere - I am Henry Fredrick, son of Derek Fredrick, son of Fred, son of Fredrick! My parents have a cottage on the farm, and my wife Kirsten and I live in the farmhouse with our three daughters so it would seem that I am to be the last of the Fredricks! It is rather soon to say whether any of our daughters will join us in the business but they have a while to think about it as, at 48 years old, I hope to carry on farming for another 20 years.

Farmers like to moan, but one thing we have never regretted is the decision, taken in 1998, to convert our farm to organic. By June 2001 the conversion was complete and we were selling organic milk - the farm has never looked back! There are many changes to the farm, which can all be summarised with a good Devon expression: “doing things proper”.

 

Much goes into doing things proper, including looking after the cows very well in order to prevent disease and minimise the need for antibiotics, and also employing proper crop rotations. This has made a great difference to Mosshayne - we needed to employ more staff and put in more fencing and water pipes so we could rotate the animals around fields that had, until then, been an arable prairie. Mossahyne is the first livestock farm you see heading east out of Exeter and I’m sure the sight of cows grazing and chicken ranging all over the farm is a welcome one for the many people who use the bridleway, footpaths, and permissive footpaths which cross it.

 

We keep cows and chickens, and grow potatoes on 500 acres but it’s the paperwork, telephone and meetings that take most of my time so an excellent team, led by our farm foreman, Andrew Brook, does most of the real work out on the farm. Altogether there are seven people working here (apart from the family) both full and part-time and all are kept busy farming organically and “doing things proper”. The 160 dairy cows have to be milked twice a day, 365 days of the year starting at 5am and finishing at 5.30pm. We like to have two people milking so that we can make a good job of putting a clean milking machine onto a clean udder on every cow, every time, even at five o’clock on Christmas morning!

Mosshayne Farm is in the parish of Broadclyst, one of a number of parishes in the valley of the river Clyst, which flows down the east side of the farm where we have our permanent pasture. There are trout in the river, but very few ever get caught, reputedly because they are ‘cannibal’ trout, more interested in eating other fish than in chasing after a fly. Happily, otters are now being seen here again. The rest of the farm is low, sandy ridges which stays relatively dry and is good for the mobile chicken houses and for growing crops. On this ground we employ a rotation of crops: Firstly, we plant a mixture of grass and clover for grazing by the cows. After three or four years there’s a good thick turf suitable for the mobile chicken houses, with lots of little creatures for the chicken to eat. After about a year, the chickens have fertilised the ground beautifully so we move them away and plough in all that fertility and plant feed crops for the cows. When they are harvested we grow organic baby salad potatoes to be sold in supermarkets. Finally, after about eight years we start all over again all over again with grass. This is an ancient way of mixed farming that is highly sustainable which maintains the soil fertility and avoids the build up of pests so there is less need for the artificial fertilisers and pesticides which we are not, as organic farmers, allowed to use.

 

I  do have other interests, one of them being prehistoric archaeology, and I have published some obscure articles about prehistoric farming. On this farm, like many others, there are prehistoric flints that come to the surface at ploughing and these have been systematically picked up and recorded by myself and other amateur archaeologists. My favourite find is called a ‘leaf shaped arrowhead’, which is a particular type that was made about 5-6000 years ago. Handling this, I feel a link to those people who have lived, loved and farmed here on this land down the centuries and I am proud of my part in maintaining it for future generations.