Regenerative Farming

Soil health is at the core of everything we do at Wexcombe. Healthy soil grows healthier food, supports more wildlife, holds more water and locks away more carbon. It’s not a side benefit, it’s the whole point.

Conventional farming has spent decades treating soil as little more than a growing medium, something to be loaded with chemicals and forced into productivity. We take the opposite view. Soil is a living system, extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily valuable, and once it’s degraded it takes years to recover. Every decision we make on this farm, from how we graze our cattle to what we plant and when, comes back to these five principles. They’re not a marketing framework. They’re genuinely how we farm.

1. Keep the Soil Covered

Bare soil is vulnerable soil. Left exposed to wind and rain, it erodes, dries out and loses the biological activity that makes it productive in the first place. In a heavy downpour, unprotected topsoil simply washes away, taking years of built-up fertility with it.

We keep our land covered wherever possible, using cover crops, herbal leys and carefully managed grazing to ensure there’s always something growing or protecting the surface. In practice this means planning well ahead, thinking about what comes after every crop or grazing rotation so there’s no window where the ground is left open. It’s one of the simplest things you can do for a field, and consistently one of the most effective. The difference in soil structure and moisture retention between a covered field and a bare one is something you can see and feel underfoot.

2. Minimise Disturbance

Soil is a living ecosystem of extraordinary complexity. Just a teaspoon of healthy soil contains billions of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and other organisms, all working together in ways we’re still only beginning to understand. Every time that system is ploughed, compacted by heavy machinery or drenched in herbicides and fungicides, it takes a serious hit. Some of that damage is recoverable. Some of it, over repeated years of intensive treatment, is not.

We use no-till methods across our arable land, which means we’re not inverting or breaking up the soil structure when we move between crops. We’ve also significantly reduced our reliance on synthetic inputs, using them only where genuinely necessary rather than as a matter of routine. It takes more careful management and more forward planning, but the payoff is a soil biology that gets richer and more resilient every season rather than more depleted. Healthier soil needs less intervention over time, which suits us just fine.

3. Increase Diversity

Diversity is the foundation of our farming system. Monocultures are fragile by nature and do not exist in a natural environment, and while they are still common in agriculture, we are working to grow food more diversely. Our cattle graze “herbal leys” made up of more than 10 plant species, we grow oats and peas together, and sow winter cover crops with 8–10 species. Chickens also play a role, following the cattle to further enrich the farm and its soils.

Greater plant diversity supports a wider range of soil microbes, improving soil health. Diverse pastures also provide livestock with a more varied diet, helping to nurture a healthy gut microbiome — just as diversity below ground strengthens the soil ecosystem.

It also means more flowers, more insects, more birds and a farm that begins to function more like a natural landscape and less like an industrial production unit. That’s a direction of travel we’re committed to.

4. Keep Living Roots

Living roots are constantly doing useful work. They feed the networks of soil microbes that cycle nutrients and build structure. They create channels through the soil that improve drainage and aeration. And through a process called exudation, they release sugars and other compounds that draw carbon down from the atmosphere and lock it into the ground. When a field sits bare between crops, all of that activity stops. The soil surface bakes or freezes, microbial communities go quiet and the slow, steady work of building fertility pauses.

We manage our cropping rotations and grazing patterns to keep living roots in the ground for as much of the year as possible, plugging gaps with cover crops and herbal mixes where a cash crop isn’t growing. It requires detailed planning across the whole farm calendar and a willingness to make decisions months in advance, but the cumulative benefit to soil health over time is one of the most significant things we can do.

5. Integrate Livestock

Animals and land have always belonged together, and separating them, as industrial farming largely did through the twentieth century, has been damaging for both. Our Hereford-Cross cattle graze in rotation across the farm, moving to a fresh paddock every single day. Our hens follow behind them across the pasture, scratching through the dung, breaking pest cycles and spreading fertility as they go.

This mimics the way large herds of animals have always moved across landscapes, never staying long enough in one place to overgraze, constantly stimulating new growth and feeding the soil with organic matter. The effect on the land is remarkable and measurable. Hooves break up surface compaction, dung feeds billions of soil organisms, and the combination of grazing pressure and recovery time encourages the kind of dense, diverse sward that holds the soil together and supports real wildlife. Done well, and it does need to be done well, livestock don’t damage the land. They restore it.