wakelyns agroforestry

Wakelyns Farm, Fressingfield, Suffolk

Area: 60 acres

Certification: Soil Association

Crops: Arable, potatoes, mixed vegetables

Outlets: Markets, wholesale, farm gate

Telephone: 01379 586612

After a long career at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, and as Professor of Plant Pathology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Martin Wolfe moved to Wakelyns Farm at Fressingfield, Suffolk in 1997 to continue his agro-ecological research. He was then appointed Research Director of Elm Farm Research Centre (now the Organic Research Centre, Elm Farm) with Wakelyns Agroforestry as one of the main experimental sites.

The farm's 60 acres are laid out for 'alley-cropping', with belts of trees running north-south across the fields. The farm has five different agroforestry systems, characterised by the tree belts - mixed hardwood and fruit tree standards, willow coppice and hazel coppice. The agricultural projects are rotated around these systems, investigating cereals, potatoes and mixed vegetable cropping.

Turning away from the consensus that monoculture systems give the best yields (with oil-based support), Martin brings as many species together as possible. The broad objective of all the projects is to investigate mixed cropping at all scales, so that the crops can benefit from interactions - expected and unforeseen - among the different plants in the agricultural systems. These interactions operate at all levels and among all combinations of the trees, their under-storey, the crops and the green manures.

In a Defra vegetable project, Professor Wolfe tried to bring together the fertility building and cropping cycles of a crop rotation, by growing the vegetables between strips of clover. The clover strips were laid down for several years, with five families of vegetables rotated amongst the beds in between. After three or so years, the vegetable system could then be super-rotated onto a different part of the farm, with potatoes coming on to clear up accumulated grass weeds.

Benefits included increased worm and beetle populations finding a safe habitat beneath and amongst the clover, and generally low incidence of pests and diseases including carrot fly, probably because the flies find it harder to locate the carrots amongst the clover. At a practical level, the system was very easy to work because of the quick-drying 'paths' between the vegetable rows.

The clover had to be pure, rather than a mixed grass ley, to reduce weed problems. Unfortunately, the fertility brought to the soil by the permanent clover strips was not easily available to the vegetables in the strips between. However, the accumulated nitrogen and, probably, available potassium, led to high yields of potatoes following the vegetables in the longer super-rotation.

For the potatoes, an EU-funded project showed that, to help delay development of blight, it is important to use as many different varieties as possible and to plant them in a mosaic, with the smallest possible patches of each variety. Variety mixtures can also work well, but it is crucial to use a well-understood mixture.

The current major project (Defra-funded) is developing wheat populations, as opposed to monocultures, in which each plant in the crop is different from every other. Such crops show immense buffering capacity against varying environments and may prove particularly valuable in a time of climate change and high oil prices.

Professor Wolfe's hope is that these highly diversified growing systems, with no external inputs, will provide models for stockless organic farms. The systems are analogous to mixed farms with animals, but in this case it is very small animals and micro-organisms that convert the green manure crops and other vegetative residues into useful fertility.

Wakelyns Farm is also unusual in that the food crops are a by-product of the experimental procedures. However, the farm produces significant quantities of potatoes, vegetables, cereals and wood for fuel and crafts. The bulk of the potatoes and vegetables is sold through Eostre Organics, with smaller quantities going to local people and markets, Metfield Stores and the Queen's Head at Bramfield. Much of the wood fuel is used for on-farm heating as part of a longer-term project for self-sufficiency, and perhaps even export, in energy.