Farming career decision: I stopped at Keyworth School till, in actual fact, till just before we were due to take the 11+. And then we moved down to West Bridgford and I went to South County School for the last few months of my junior school life - where I took the 11+. But my pass was actually attributed to Keyworth School, not South County. Having passed the 11+, from thereon I went on to West Bridgford Grammar School, which, when I chose a career in farming was much to the disgust of my Headmaster, because he thought nobody with a Grammar school education should go into farming. So when it came to parents' evening to discuss careers, he really didn't want to speak to my parents at all.
…Basically because during the school holidays, particularly the summer holidays, I'd gone to my godmother's farm, Betty Scott at Church Site Farm, Thorpe-in-the-Glebe

Root crops at Holly Farm, Keyworth: The sugar beet went to the factory at Colwick. Most of the potatoes sold locally;, we used to take them to the chip shop in Keyworth, to the chip shop in Cotgrave. There are very few [potatoes] now; you've got to go out towards Barton, I think, to find anybody growing potatoes. There are [some] on the Costock Road, but most of the places around Keyworth grew at least half an acre of potatoes. Jack Holden he used to grow some, and Dick Watkins who used to be the Grange Farm in Widmerpool. We used to go and help him with his planting and picking. And it was quite common for each farm to have a small area. … it is so much easier on the sandy area for them now. They've decided it's far better ground for either grass or cereals around here.

Soil variation: There is quite a variation, particularly from one farm to another. In general most of the areas of North Lodge is sort of sandy clay loam. But the hillsides are quite, going on to quite heavy clay. And then you move on to Cotgrave, which is a much heavier clay up there - sort of on the edge of Owthorpe boulders - which is pretty awful stuff, but yields extremely well.
[At North Lodge] there's a change down by the brook and there's also a change on top of the hill. North Lodge itself, where the house actually stands, is virtually on sand. There's a band of sand, which runs round the top of the hill and that very rapidly runs back into clay. And even where my bungalow stands here, sort of two, three hundred yards from North Lodge House, it's a lot heavier ground than what North Lodge stands on. The sort of outlying fields, even when Roger moved in, a lot of it was scrub land more or less. Grazing land - the hillsides particularly where the limestone breaks out - they were wet and not farmed particularly well at all.

Computer mapping: We have a very nice computer mapping system, which is based on OS data with a program through Farm Plan that literally maps everything out. So we can measure whatever we want to.
That's basically why we got it in the first place - because of arguments over areas with the Ministry, We through we were right and they through they were right. So we thought we will try and prove this once and for all, so we bought the mapping programme and now there can be no doubt because we can measure in or out exactly what we want to do.
It certainly does help particularly if you want to measure areas of set-aside or something like that out, where all I've got to do is sit in the office, draw the strip down, draw a line down the computer and that will tell me exactly how much I've taken out. I don't have to go plodding round the field with a wheel measuring it out.

Environmental work: Recently we had hedges laid, it's a long long time since I've done any hedge laying, I think when Roger first came to North Lodge, him and a friend did lay a lot of hedges because most of them were overgrown then. But in the intervening years, no we haven't laid that many. We planted one or two new hedges and had somebody in to lay those.
We've planted an awful lot of trees. Hedgerow trees particularly are very very hard to get to establish. If you plant in little shelter belts they seem to get going a lot easier than just the odd tree in the hedgerow, they generally don't get enough water. After a winter like we've just had anything that was planted last year should grow, but … Normally it's just - it's almost a waste of time. I've lost track of how many trees we've planted over the years that haven't survived.
We've done two quite reasonable ponds - and one a hundred yards down from the farm - was where there'd always been a spring and a wet hole. I think it was probably a watering place there as well when the area used to be grazed. And we dug that out many years ago - probably back in the 1970's, I think. It was when we first did it; then about five, six years ago we decided to enlarge it and probably made it about three times as big as it originally was - and opened the area up around it.

Set-aside strips: Now, we've the ability to put set-aside strips in rather than taking large areas out as set- aside. We now have twelve metre strips running along side the main watercourses, which gives a better habitat for the wild life. There's a lot of seeding grasses there. It's somewhere for the birds to get out of the wheat and barley when it's raining, so they can sit and dry out - as are the tracks around the farm. It also means that we aren't putting any fertilizer near the watercourses. We aren't spraying near the watercourse.
It's a good idea; it's a pity that they can't sort of grass the nettle and say, "Right, you can cut your strips down to five metres." And then they could go round all the watercourses round the far. You could have strips round virtually every ditch. But unfortunately the minimum width at the moment is either twelve or twenty metres depending on the situation.