A Year on the Estate: 2023 in Review

APRIL

We got busy preparing for May’s Lincolnshire Wolds Outdoor Festival but found time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wolds being designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

At the Hall, the Saturday Club had a busy couple of weeks. Bradley was crowned winner of the photography competition with his image of Honey the Hall Cat peeping from a tree. Later that weekend, the gang came together for a team photo. The process very much resembled herding cats until an actual cat, Marmite, took charge. The team also got plenty of work done. With the help of Clint and Kitty, fresh allotment plots were weeded, raked and divided up, decisions were taken on what produce to grow and laburnum trees were planted.

Mandatory housing measures to manage the risk of avian flu were lifted on 18th April and the Lincolnshire Buff flock emerged into the Walled Garden ready to make the most of the fine spring weather. Freedom and fresh grass tasted pretty sweet to our chooks after a long winter indoors.

MAY

Exciting plans were taking shape around the Estate. In early May, Will Mower and his team from Vine-Works planted 12,600 grape vines. The job started with fencing then moved on to sub-soiling in two directions, ploughing, power-harrowing and finally vine-planting, all at a remarkable pace. We’re aiming for a versatile crop that will give us both still and sparkling varieties with intriguing changes of character over time. We planted a range of grapes, including Chardonnay, Reichensteiner, Solaris, Seyval, Muscaris, Cabernet Cortis and Pinot Noir.

Elsewhere on the arable land, we drilled a pea and oat mix aiming to harvest home-grown feed to supplement the diets of our Lincolnshire Buff chickens and Norfolk Black turkeys. Our rare-breed birds forage in our gardens and pastures when official guidance permits, but growing our own nutritious bird-feed in keeping with our commitment to regenerative farming and minimising food-miles will likely prove a real boon.

At Keal Farm Yard, Kevin Lovett and his team installed 340 x 425W photo-voltaic panels on the crew sheds, adding to the 176 x 425W panels installed at Harden’s Gap in March. In 2022, we upgraded our electrical transmission system so that we could share solar power across the Estate via the grid. The arrays at Harden’s Gap and Keal Farm are big steps towards our goal of farming as sustainably as possible.

If you were able to join us at the Estate Open Weekend on 20th and 21st May, thanks for your company. We hope you enjoyed the sunshine, music, hospitality and walking as much as we did.

JUNE

After four busy, creative and award-winning years, Master Distiller Tristan Jørgensen left the Massingberd-Mundy Distillery for fresh pastures. We caught up with Tristan to take stock of his time at South Ormsby Estate.

At the time of writing, the bone-dry days of spring and summer seem very distant. Nevertheless, extremes of wet and dry with higher average temperatures seem to be the new normal. After a drier-than-average May, we had no rain whatsoever up to mid-June and very little for the rest of that month. June 2023 would turn out to be our hottest on record; across the UK, the average temperature for the month was 15.8C, exceeding both 1940 and 1976 by a substantial margin of 0.9C.

We caught up with Hall Steward Clint Coughlan on managing water, working with Saturday Club alumnus Kitty, harvesting honey and life at the Hall: “There’s not been much rain this summer and dry ground can be a challenge for gardening. I can spend 90 minutes a day watering with rain-water and spring-water, but then again the grass isn’t growing much so there’s less mowing to do. We had 25mm of rain a few weekends ago but it all came down in about 10 minutes so wasn’t that useful. I still ended up cutting the Walled Garden’s lawn in 30C heat.”

JULY

The weather turned decisively but at least the rain meant that the team could crack on with drilling the winter forage crop. This essential task ensures that our Lincoln Red herd can remain outdoors, wholly supported by our land, all-year-round. The weather remained as capricious as ever. At 4pm on 19th July 2022, a record UK high of 40.3C was recorded at Coningsby, 17 miles from our doorstep. On 19th July 2023, our local daytime high was 18C. 2023’s key issue from a farming perspective was erratic rainfall levels; June was bone-dry and July would turn out to exceed all expectations.

Work to improve the Lake continued apace. A start was made on improving the Lake’s edging without the use of concrete. This was a job for hefty vehicles and temporary tracks were laid to protect the ground. Meanwhile, the Saturday Club continued to impress with their solid work ethic. They cleared three whole barrows of weeds from the Old School and another barrow or two from their own allotment. They also harvested their own produce in the form of purple carrots, orange carrots, onions, baby beetroot and peas. This healthy crop was divvied up and went home with the kids who’d grown it.

AUGUST

The harvest began in earnest while we prayed for a tad more sunshine to finish off a few of our crops. This was emphatically a summer of two halves. At the Lake, we set about taking 10,000 tons of silt from the Lake, enough for 500 x 20-ton lorry-loads. A silt pusher – a hefty, amphibious bulldozer – gathered up silt from the lake-bed for excavators to scoop up. That silt was then removed by lorries to be used as a home-made, organic fertiliser on our arable land for many seasons to come. We hope that a deeper, more capacious and free-flowing Lake in our biodiverse setting will attract all sorts of new wildlife. And when customers buy our organic produce, it may have been helped to grow by generations of lake silt.

We welcomed new Herd Manager Darren MacDonald to the Estate team: “I’m 49-years-old, I’m from north of Cape Town and I’ve been in agriculture most of my life. Farming was in the family and we had about 280 head of cattle. In my thirties, I ran a mountaineering business and travelled widely. We took clients to the highest mountain on every continent. I’ve tackled Everest, Kilimanjaro and the Andes to name a few.”

SEPTEMBER

After 18 months of work, the unused stables at Manor Farm were ready to welcome Estate staff. They now boast well-insulated floors, walls, roofing and windows and they’ll provide four high-quality, energy-efficient office spaces for new and existing commercial operations. Nearby, Manor Farm House was also being given a state-of-the-art makeover, respecting its heritage while giving it the best possible standard of thermal efficiency. Construction work was underway to convert 12 stables at Harden’s Gap into six office units which should be ready by next spring.

Staff and residents were preparing to move out of the Hall. In their absence, we’ll be comprehensively updating the electrics and making the heating and hot water as efficient as possible. Substantial work was done in 2021 to reinforce one floor but there are two more to go! We’ll also be returning the roof to its original, intended shape.

The weather remained newsworthy. For the first time on record, UK temperatures exceeded 30C for six consecutive days in September. Heathrow Airport recorded 32.7C on Saturday 9th September, the year’s highest temperature.

OCTOBER

The restoration of the Lake was nearly complete. The edges had been tidied and planted up, the kingfisher tunnels were in place, 10,000 tons of fertile silt had been moved to the arable land and the water had a deep, healthy sheen. Storm Babet brought more than a month’s rain to Lincolnshire over 24 hours. Residents and businesses across the county experienced flooding, and the rest of autumn would bring more rain to saturated ground to hamper the clean-up. A difficult October with yo-yoing temperatures and more rain than the landscape could absorb followed the UK’s joint-warmest September since 1884.

We got the skinny from Hall Steward Clint Coughlan: “We measured 80mm of rainfall in the Walled Garden last Friday. I was out in it and was soaked to the skin. There’s a little bridge between the courtyard and the Walled Garden and one side of it floated up and raised itself like Tower Bridge. What is usually a babbling brook turned into a raging torrent. I kept clearing the drains of leaves to let the water flow away and stop the courtyard from flooding.”

NOVEMBER

We welcomed Ash Young to the Estate team as Tour Development Manager: “I’m primarily here to develop the new Estate birdwatching tours and visitor accommodation. The vision is to develop three-to-four-night birdwatching tours for visitors staying here on an all-inclusive basis. The tours will showcase Estate produce by including all meals and drinks within the tour packages, ideally with 100% of the ingredients being produced on the Estate or by trusted local suppliers.”

Massingberd-Mundy Gin won ‘Drinks Product of the Year’ at Lincolnshire Life Magazine’s Taste of Excellence Food & Drink Awards 2023. This was the third year running we’d been nominated; Burrell’s Dry Gin won in 2021 and earned a Gold Citation in 2022. Here’s Tristan: “Holy moly! I’m so humbled and proud. Despite me leaving for pastures new, Massingberd-Mundy Distillery is still proving popular amongst their loyal fans. Thank you to everyone who voted!”

Charlie and Louis took the pick of our native-breed Lincolnshire Buff chickens and Norfolk Black turkeys to the East of England Poultry Club’s Autumn Show at Stickney and came back with a bulging bag of rosettes and trophies. They claimed several firsts, seconds and thirds, and bagged trophies for Best Cockerel, Best Pullet, Best Hen, Best of Breed and Best Opposite Sex. We celebrated National Tree Week and World Soil Day, both handy reminders of what it takes to feed the nation while caring for our wondrous countryside sustainably and responsibly.

DECEMBER

We were thrilled to be one of the venues hosting the Lincolnshire Farm of the Future Study Tour alongside Dyson Farming and the University of Lincoln. Paul and Darren also hosted students from Riseholme College in weather only a farmer could love. On top of all that, we were about to become a Climate Demonstration Farm (CDF), part of a pan-European network of farmers promoting and leading a climate-smart approach. That means we’ll get to play a strong part in helping the farming community boost resilience to the effects of climate-change, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and improve carbon sequestration.

As we prepared to add another 600m of hedgerow to the 7km we’ve planted since 2018, we took a look at how hedgerows fell in and out of favour over 4,000 years of farming history, and why restoring them matters.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our brisk gallop through 2023. If you’d like to share your views on anything you’ve read here, join in the conversation on Facebook. We’ll see you next year.