Our first year..

If you live in the Kelsale area, you may have noticed that the landscape is changing in the triangle of land between Butchers Road and the railway line. In 2021 this area of about 50 acres was two conventionally farmed wheat fields.

It is now under the management of Julian and Fiona Cusack who constitute the Nonsuch Farm Partnership and live nearby in Middleton. Farming expertise is provided by Farm Manager, Sam Hanks, who lives in Saxmundham.

Nonsuch Farm will be a mixed organic farm combining agroforestry in the upper northern section of the farm with a rotational cropping operation on the lower part.

We acquired the land in February 2022. Although the previous year’s wheat had been harvested, we soon noticed that a new crop of wheat was growing from the seed left behind. This provided our first saleable crop later in the year.

In the Spring of 2022, we sowed a cover crop in the upper field. This included vetches, chicory and clovers designed to start building natural soil fertility. The crop was slow to establish and ran into the severe drought conditions of last summer.

But one year on there is a rich mix of plants with crimson clover particularly prominent as can be seen from this photo taken in May 2023.

Cover crop with prominent crimson clover, May 2023

In the Autumn of 2022, you may have seen one man and a large digger on site. The result was 6 new farm ponds, funded by Natural England as part of the Great Crested Newt conservation program. This picture shows Sam at the bottom of one of the newly created ponds before it filled up with rainwater.

One of our six new farm ponds

Also in the autumn we sowed cover crops in the lower field. The most successful of these was a field of vetch which we plan to harvest for forage this summer.

In January 2023 there was more machinery on site to fell the line of hybrid poplar trees along the railway. This was necessary for the safety of the railway and we have made good use of the timber by converting it to wood chip which you can see in this photo was used as mulch for our planting of 300 fruit trees. These together with 50 walnut trees have been planted in rows running north to south in the upper field.

One of newly planted double rows of fruit trees

As we write this in May 2023, work is just finishing on the foundations and access to our planned winter livestock quarters which we plan also to use for solar power generation and rainwater harvesting.  Work is also nearing completion on fencing which will show how we have divided the lower field into smaller units roughly in line with how the land was divided at the end of the second world war before the hedges were removed.  

 We have also erected fencing to delineate what we plan to open as permissive paths on the field margins along Butchers Road and Lowes Hill.

We have had setbacks. Some of our cover crops were outcompeted by an outbreakof black grass. Some of this has been mown before it has a chance to set seed, but our ultimate solution is a flock of sheep which we hope to bring on site in the next few weeks once the livestock fencing is complete.

We are a farming business and hope in due course to sell food into local markets. But we also have a key objective to build biodiversity across the site. We are grateful for the work of the Kelsale Biodiversity Group who have helped us baseline the wildlife on site as we began work last year. As our hedges, trees and ponds mature we hope to see a transformation of the hillside from open arable monoculture to a more complex mix of habitats which we hope might one day attract species like the turtle dove. 

Julian and Fiona Cusack

25 May 2023