‘We're the solution, not the problem'

The new CLA president on farming today, family tragedy and grey partridge

-  Kate Green

IT is always fun discovering, every two years, the particular passions of the new president of the Country Land & Business Association (CLA), from motorbikes and mushrooms to mountaineering. The 55th, Mark Tufnell, who took office last week, is a ‘grey-partridge nut’, whose favorite pastime is walking around his Cotswold farm totting up endangered Perdix perdix.

‘We started counting in 2005 with one pair and got up to 20 pairs in 2012, but it crashed with some bad winters,’ he says. ‘We now have a young keeper who carries out legal predator control and we went up to 72 pairs this spring.’

Mr Tufnell explains that, in his father’s day, the estate was continuous cereals: ‘Everyone did it round here when we went into the EU, but we can’t do the turnover of, say, Lincolnshire, and it struck me as not a great way to farm. When Dad died in 1995, it was the time of [the GWCT’s] Allerton Farm experiment and set aside. Now, practically every field has a margin, a strip for beetle banks and so on, and they really work. You put in a cereal mix with no sprays, allow broadleaf weeds to come up and it’s those seeds that the partridge eat.’

The farm is beginning to hark back to his grandmother’s day, with sheep and cattle (tenant farmed), arable rotation, cover crops, and wildflower meadows; it will be in Defra’s new Countryside Stewardship scheme and is part of a farm cluster. Mr. Tufnell says the thrust of his presidency will be ‘trying to end up with a [post-Brexit] transition without farmers going bust and getting people to understand that “sustainable farming” is about growing food.