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“I don't know any other way to farm. I've never sat on a plow. I'd have no idea how to do any cultivation. No-till is the only way I know how to do it.”

— Thomas Gent, No-Tiller, Tydd St. Giles, England

For this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers & Innovators Podcast, brought to you by SOURCE® from Sound Agriculture, Thomas Gent, a 4th-generation farmer, shares the details of the no-till system on his family farm in Tydd St. Giles, England. Gent’s father and grandfather made the decision to switch to no-till 16 years ago, and for him, it’s the only way he’s ever known how to farm.  

If you are interested in more no-till history, check out the newly released 448-page second edition of From Maverick to Mainstream: A History of No-Till Farming that includes 32 more pages than the first edition. Order your copy here.

Related Content

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• British Farmer Switches to No-Till to Save Money on Rising Input Costs
• No-Till Serves as Entry Point for British Grower

No-Till Farmer‘s No-Till Influencers & Innovators Podcast podcast is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.

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Full Transcript

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators Podcast, brought to you by SOURCE from Sound Agriculture. I'm Mackane Vogel, assistant editor of No-Till Farmer. In today's episode, Thomas Gent, a fourth generation farmer, shares the details of the no-till system on his family farm in Tydd Saint Giles, England. Gent's father and grandfather made the decision to switch to no-till, 16 years ago, and for him, it's the only way he's ever known how to farm.

So tell me where you're located.

Yeah. So our farm is in the UK, just in the east, near Cambridge. We're on an area of land, or the edge of the Fens. Yeah, it's very, very flat here. We're about a meter below sea level.

You farm with your dad? What's his name?

So yeah, my dad's Edward Gent. He farms with me, and then we farm about 800 hectares, and we also have one other employee on the farm.

So 800 hectares would be 1700 acres or so?

Yeah, something like that. I don't know acres. About 2000 acres I think, yeah.

Okay. I assume... You look young. You're still young, so it was your dad that started with no-till, not you?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm 26, and we've been farming this way for about 16 years. So my dad and granddad actually made this transition when I was about 10. But the exciting thing for me is I don't know any other way to farm. I've never sat on a plow. I'd have no idea how to do any cultivation. This is the only way I know how to do it, which is exciting I think. I didn't realize we were doing anything unique until very recently, really.

So yeah, grandad and dad made that transition 16 years ago. They made it for a financial reason. They could see that our soils were heading in the wrong direction, and it was costing us more and more money to produce the same yield. So everything was just going wrong really. We were at a point then when the global wheat market was very low, and our machinery was very old, so we were at a kind of decision point where we either had to invest in new machinery, a fleet of new heavy machinery, or granddad had actually been on holiday to Argentina and he'd seen them doing some no-till out there. He had a friend in the UK that just started to do it a year before us, so he said he would try it.

So we bought a John Deere 750A and we did it... Grandad always says, he remembers we did no-till on one field one year, and he was in the field and he planted the field. In the next field there was my dad and my uncle, and I think there was three or four of them, all in big 1000 horsepower tractors trying to plant the wheat, trying to do the same job as him, and he was in a little 200 horsepower tractor, and he was achieving the same thing. Actually, luckily that year, the yield on the no-till field was better than the other field so we decided that we should go for it, and we sold all of our heavy equipment, and we bought a different direct drill, and we just went for it.

Well, your grandfather went to South America, which got his eyes open because both Argentina, and Brazil, and Paraguay got a huge percentage of the land that's no-tilled.

Absolutely.

Saw it working.

Yeah, absolutely. He saw it working out there, and he also knew... He saw it working out there and they weren't getting any subsidies, so they weren't getting any government support out there, so they were forced to farm in this way. He thought, we are only able to farm in the kind of heavy tillage way in Europe because we get subsidies, so we would be in the best position if we farm the way that they farm and we still get subsidies. Then we are going to be very rich.

So what crops do you no-till?

Yeah, so we grow quite a range of crops now. We grow wheat, oil seed, grape or canola, I think you call it. Field beans, rye, triticale, sometimes a bit of linseed, a bit of maize, corn, and we also started to do now a bit of grass lays, so sort of three or four year temporary grass lays, which have been a big benefit to our farm and our soils.

Do you have any livestock?

So my uncle has poultry. We've got 64,000 birds, which are for eggs, but my uncle runs the chickens, and my dad runs the arable, and they try not to argue too much. But on the fields we don't have any livestock but sort of graze the fields.

Yeah. Seeding cover crops.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say we've only started to really go heavy into cover crops in the last, maybe four or five years. Before that we didn't really do much, but we've done a lot more of it now, and we definitely see when we plant a cover crop, the following two or three years, the cash crop is awesome. Our struggle is to get the cover crop to... to have time to plant the cover crop early enough because we're busy harvesting, right? It's like kind of resources, a practical problem, but we really want to do more cover cropping.

Well, that's the same problem here in the States. We're harvesting corn and soybeans when we should be seeding cover crops into that ground. One of the benefits we have here with guys that have dairy or beef operations that are cutting corn silage, that gives them an extra two or three, four weeks to get cover crops in the ground. But we have some people here who aerial seed. Some people have said it's been great. Some people have said it hasn't worked for me.

Yeah, we've tried it. So we're always trying, same as lots of farmers, I think. We're always trying to build our own machines and different ways to do things. For a little bit, we put seed on the back of the combine header to see if we could plant the cover crop while we were combining. It didn't really work. The cover crop didn't grow, but I think it was a good idea. We tried lots of aerial seeding and stuff, but what we really found is cover crop seed is quite expensive and so if you buy it, you want to make sure it grows. The only way to do that is to drill it, really. So we just try and drill it if we can.

We have a few people in the U.S. who've got a seeder mounted on their combine, but it's areas where they got moisture, whatever. What are you seeding as cover crops? A single, or a mix, or what?

Yeah, definitely a mix. Sometimes... So we save our own seed as much as we can. We use some oats and some field beans, and stuff like that that we... or grape or canola, stuff that we can save. We don't like to do that too much because obviously, we get a bit of disease crossover, but it's cheap. But yeah, we do buy mixes, proper seed mixes, mostly kind of deep rooting stuff, like veg and radishes. We try and do as much sort of nitrogen fixing stuff. I am really, really, really interested in trying to get clover to be kind of permanently established under the understory. We've tried to do a lot of companion cropping, so when we grow canola, we grow buckwheat with it. We try to go clover with it, but it's tricky to get those small seeds to establish. I think that's the biggest struggle that we found with cover cropping is the small seeds, which often are the interesting plants that you want to grow, it's very hard to get small seeds to establish properly.

So you're drilling your cover crops?

Yeah, we're definitely drilling our cover crops. My granddad designs machinery, so he has the patent on a drill. I think in America it's K-Hart. It's available in America, so it's on the K-Hart machine. It's called a Weavings machine in Europe. It's got the angle disc cutter. So that's like granddad's patent and design. So yeah, we use that drill for everything.

So looking back to when your grandfather and your dad started no-till drilling 16 years ago, they make some mistakes. What would they tell others to avoid?

Yeah, I mean we definitely made lots of mistakes, and to be honest, we still make lots of mistakes now.

You learn from your success.

Yeah, we learn a lot. But the biggest problem that we had at the start was water. We're obviously fairly low-lying here and we do get a lot of rainfall, so drainage was our biggest problem at the start. What we realized is when we were cultivating, we were actually really draining the soil every year, kind of accidentally. But as soon as we stopped doing that, we found we had a lot of puddles on the fields, and a lot of issues with water, flooding and stuff. So we actually did spend a lot of money on putting proper underground drains across the farm, which was really important. Now we have to manage our drainage system on the farm. It's a big winter job as to we have a digger, a big 360 digger, and we have to go around and dig all the trenches out of the side of the fields to make sure it drains properly. That's definitely one of our biggest problems we've had.

The other really important thing is organic matter. We spread a huge amount of organic matter, which we didn't really used to do. We work with... There's a dairy farm near here we work with. We take a lot of their cattle manure, and we obviously have the chickens we take a lot from. We take a lot of compost from local cities and stuff like that. We've increased. Our organic matter when we started was around 2% or 3% organic matter, and now we're up to 10%, 11%, 12% organic matter, and that has made the world of difference to our farm.

That's a huge increase. We got people here that are increasing organic manner, but I don't think to that extent.

Yeah, I know. It's mad. We didn't really expect it to go up that much either but the fields that are at the highest, they are absolutely our best fields and those, we've had... I don't know if this translates very well, but we had wheat crops this year of 11 tons of hectare, and we were only putting on 110, 120 kilograms of nitrogen on per hectare. Maybe you need to translate in that into American numbers, but that's seriously amazing and very profitable.

How are you terminating your cover crops?

We tried to grow a lot of cover crops that are frost... that get damaged by the frost, so hopefully as much gets killed by the frost as we can. We tried rolling them, we've tried crimping them, we've tried grazing them with sheep, and we do keep trying those things, but we always end up having to do a Roundup spray on them to make sure that they're kind of terminated before the cash crop. This is why I'm really excited to see if I can get a constant understory of clover growing. I don't know if you have people trying that in the U.S., but it's definitely in Europe, a thing that everybody wants to try is to try and get that permanent clover growing so hopefully, you don't have to kill it.

So then you would plant right into this clover?

Yeah. Do you have people trying that in the U.S. or not?

Well, probably a few, but it's not very common.

No, it's not very common here, but I think it's... People that have been doing it a long time, it's the next phase because obviously, clover's a nitrogen fixing plant, and if we can get it to be permanently established, there's a lot of clovers that are very short and don't grow very high, and it's also resistant to a lot of chemicals. So in theory, we can plant wheat or anything straight into that. We're going to try it this year and we'll see how we get on.

So the clover, you would plant your other crops into this clover without killing it with herbicides, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Okay. So you're almost... The fad here right now in the U.S. is to plant green?

Yeah,

That's kind of what you would be doing, but you would hope this clover would last for how many years?

Well, four or five years, but we'd keep renewing it. So to the plan would be to have it just permanently there, constantly.

This-

As soon as you harvested, as soon as you combined, then it will be there fixing nitrogen.

What's interesting on this is on this ground, you don't have to seed the cover crop, right?

Exactly.

Wow.

The problem with it is the clover seed is very expensive, and it's quite hard to get the clover to establish well. But if the clover gets established really well, it will also suppress weeds from growing because it will make a canopy and hopefully be really thick. So that's the plan, but we'll see if we can do it.

What seeding rate do you think you're going to use on the clover?

Yeah, I mean, we've tried... I don't know the answer to that because I don't know which one's going to work best.

Yeah.

We've tried lots of different rates. We've done some really, really low rates, sort of like one or two kilograms a hectare. The plan for that is to allow it to multiply by itself, allow it to go to seed, and grow and establish. Then we've tried some very heavy doses to see if we can get it to establish quite quickly. I would say we haven't decided which one's best yet.

Tried this for one or two years, and you see the leaves, right?

Yeah. So how we've tried to do it in the past is we've done companion crop with canola. So we do the canola in one, and then the clover, and then alternate rows. We tried to do that. It didn't really work. The clover didn't really establish very well and it didn't really last very long. So now what we've tried is we've tried to... Well, we've set aside 20 hectares where we've just planted clover, and for two years we just allow the clover to establish. We don't crop it. We've just got to the point.... So that's been established for two years, so now we have about 20 hectares of really thick clover fields. So now this autumn, we're going to plant some winter wheat into it in the next few weeks and see... And then we're just going to see if the winter wheat grows well or not.

When you establish this clover without a cash crop, you no-tilled the clover?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Then we've been silaging the clover and taking it to the dairy farm.

Okay. So what kind of drill do you folks have?

Yeah, so we have a Weaving. In the UK, it's called a Weavings GD. It's an eight meter. It's got angled discs.

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There's not a huge anchorage of no-till in Great Britain, correct?

It's definitely grown a lot in the last few years. I would probably say somewhere between 5% and 10% of the farmland is no-till in the UK. Then I would probably say there's around 50% that are kind of, reduced tillage. There's a very trendy thing in the UK for reduced tillage. Then everybody else, I would say is fairly conventional.

Well we've got maybe a third of the acreage in the U.S. that's no-tilled, but then we got some people who don't do it every year, and we've got continuous, no-till. What's been the biggest mistake or concerns you have with cover crops?

That's a good question. Really, they're very expensive, we found, and it's very hard to quantify the financial benefit of them. That's been our hardest thing is the decision process of are they worth the cost? Especially if don't establish very well, because the cover crop seed's very expensive and once we've planted it, there's probably quite a high likelihood that it won't get established properly. It won't grow away properly before the winter comes so then it becomes a waste of time, really, a waste of money. So that's definitely been our biggest issue.

I would say our other biggest issue is terminating the cover crop at the right time because yeah, there's a big trend in the UK as well to drill into the green. Problem with that is we have... Our soils are quite heavy. They lay very wet soils and so to drill the spring crops properly, we really need to be quite dry. That means we have to terminate the cover crops early to give it time for the surface to dry, and then that means are we really giving the cover crops a long enough time to work?

So I guess to get over this... So when we first started cover crops, we did what everybody did, I think, is try and get your cover crops to go as big as possible. We were growing cover crops taller than me, six foot, and really, really thick, but we found that was a problem then there was too much residue. So now we try and go actually quite small and quite spaced out cover crops, just to allow, basically the air to circulate and the soil to keep dry so when we want to drill, there's not too much residue left.

How long are you... When are you terminating the cover crops, in terms of weeks, before you plant your cash crop?

I would say we would like to spray it off about a month before-

Okay.

... you want to plant. Something like that.

Yeah.

It depends on the year though. It depends how wet it is.

Sure. Well, that's what it is. We've had a really dry spell here this year in much of the country, drought. Concerns right now that people are going to give up on cover crops because they didn't see the real value of it this year. We've had some places where they've had extreme drought and then we got other people who said, "Man, if I hadn't seeded cover crops, I might not even have had a decent cash crop this year." So it goes both ways.

Yeah, so in Europe... Well, I think in Europe, but definitely in UK is this summer, this harvest has actually been quite wet. We've probably had the opposite problem this harvest. I would say this harvest, it was quite wet, and we also got things done quite early, so we actually do have a lot of cover crops in the ground this year, like now, just because we had the opportunity to plant them.

But last summer, so like 2022, harvest, it was really, really... It was hotter here than it ever has been ,and it was crazy. It was crazy hot. So last year we didn't really get any cover crops established, just because it was so dry. There was really no point in planting them because there was no moisture, so they wouldn't have grown. So this year... But the interesting thing with that is the really dry harvest year... I don't have any neighbors that are no-till farmers so when it was really dry just before harvest, all of our crops were still growing and green while our neighbors had all died because they didn't have any moisture in the soil. But our soil, because of that organic matter, had kept the moisture for a lot longer than they had.

So you said the no-till acreage in Great Britain is growing in the last few years. What's the reason for that?

Financial pressure, probably. So obviously, we decided to leave the EU, which was a disaster, but that's my personal opinion, but we decided to do that. So what that means is our government subsidies are pushing for this type of farming. We used to get subsidies in the UK when we were part of Europe for just owning land, and all of that's gone. We're now only going to get subsidies or government support for doing soil health, cover cropping, no-till type practices. What that means is farmers are being pushed and forced in this direction for financial reasons, really. Obviously, we've also had... I don't know if this has probably just affected you as much as it has us, but the Ukrainian war has meant that fertilizer costs are astronomical, so people have got to try and find a way to cut costs somewhere.

So tell me a little about... You're involved in carbon sequestration. Tell me what you're doing on your farm, and put in the pitch for the company you're working with part-time.

Okay, so about three or four years ago when it was COVID in the UK, we had a lockdown. I was, to be honest, a bit bored because I couldn't get off farm and see my friends. So I had a bit of time in my hands and I started to sample our soil, and I started to understand that we were storing carbon in our soil. But definitely in UK then, nobody was talking about getting rewarded for that, so I set myself the challenge to see if I could find a reward for that. I tried lots of different programs out, and then I came across a company called Agreena, about four years ago. To be honest, I just liked the way they operated their system and I wanted to use their system on my farm, but they didn't have any UK operations then. So I said, "Please, can I use it on my farm?" And they said I could only use it on my farm if I talked to lots of other UK farmers about it.

I thought that was a fair enough deal, so now I kind of work for them to help talk to farmers in the UK about it. I think it's a really interesting sector that's growing. Obviously, it's growing in U.S. as well, and I think it's going to grow around the world is farmers now have this new asset that we've never had access to before, and it's also an asset that is in huge demand by companies, by some very rich companies. So this is farmers' time to take control of this asset and use it, and see if we can get a brand new income stream. It's working here, it's working in Europe, but there's a long, long way to go, I think.

So what kind of payments are you earning?

Yeah, so obviously it depends on the farming practices you do, but in the UK, we're earning somewhere between one and two certificates per hectare per year, and then they're worth around 35 euros a certificate. It's kind of like, I would say 50 to 60 euros a hectare, something like that. I don't know what that works out is in U.S. terms.

Right. So what's the interest in carbon in the UK?

Massively, actually. It is really interesting because two or three years ago, nobody was talking about carbon farming or anything to do with carbon. Now, over the last two years, you can't see... pick up any farming magazine in the UK without a lot of talk about carbon. It is a hot topic. It's super of interest. We're just going to see how the sector develops, and the opportunity and the value needs to stay with the farmer. That's the bit that I'm really passionate about is we can't let this value and this new asset be lost in the supply chain.

So the company you're working for, you see them coming into the U.S. or not?

So we are the largest carbon program in Europe now. We are in most European countries. We've got over a million hectares on the program and so yeah, we're just starting to look at how do we expand into different continents. Obviously, U.S. is a really exciting market. There's some awesome farmers over there. They speak our language. That's really good. So yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to hopefully have a trip to the U.S. soon and visit some no-till farmers.

So earlier on, before we started this podcast, it came up that this company is able to track carbon versus satellites, correct?

Yeah, absolutely.

Explain that a little.

So a year ago we acquired a company called Hummingbird Technology, a London-based company, and they have a system where we can assess the practices that go on on the field. So we can basically assess if a farmer says he grew a cover crop, we can go on the satellite and we can check that he actually did grow a cover crop, and we can do the same with tillage and quite a few different practices. What that does is it allows us to reduce the cost and verify the practices that a farmer have done on a large, large scale. So yeah, really reducing the cost means we can give more money to the farmer.

What do you see as the major concerns keeping farmers from trying carbon sequestering?

That's a really good question, actually. I think it's probably just nervousness of a new sector, and also lack of understanding. Farmers are very busy people and we're used to doing what we understand, and this is a very new sector in all ways. I think that's the kind of thing that holds people back. We've seen massive uptake in the UK, so we've probably grown five, even 10 times as big as we were last year, over this year. I think once farmers really truly understand this and they see it working for others, they're keen to get involved.

Have you had problems planting into... planting green or planting into this clover?

We've definitely have problems planting into the green. The drill has managed to... The drill works well. The problem is the amount of residue has caused quite a lot of hair pinning in the soil. We also get... It is hard for the plant, whatever you planted, let's say wheat, to grow through the residue to get to the surface. We also have quite a big problem with slugs. If there's too much residue, we just have a lot of slugs, and they eat the crop before it gets established. The real problem is that the climate here, the soils are a bit too wet, I think, to really plant on the green well. But I think in drier conditions it would work. It would be what I would go for.

Well, then you're talking about terminating your cover crops where you do it with herbicides a month earlier, so that's a long period. We here in the States may do it a week or 10 days early, or even after we plant, but...

If we try-

Go ahead.

If we can get the cover crops to be... If we don't let the cover crops get too big, then we can do it even the same day, or just the same as you said. But if the cover crops are very big, then we find that we have to do it quite a long way in advance.

Do you think your UK farmers are really concerned about climate change?

I think farmers are like the general population, right? There's some that believe it a lot, and there's some that don't. I think I would say on a practical field level, I can see the change in the climate. It's October obviously, and we've had some really, really hot days the last few days, which it's even been hotter than summer days, which is crazy. I can definitely see the climate's changing and to be honest, I'm quite nervous of it.

This has been great. I think we'll wrap this up. I appreciate you doing this, and it sounds like you've made no-till, and cover crops, and carbon sequestration really work in Great Britain.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, absolutely. Well, thanks for the time and yeah, I look forward to meeting you soon, hopefully.

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. Thanks to Thomas Gent and Frank Lessiter for that great conversation, and thanks to our sponsor, SOURCE from Sound Agriculture for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. For our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.