RUNNING a farming enterprise with the Duke of Edinburgh as your direct boss is never going to be a run of the mill agricultural role.
But scratch the surface and the issues facing Mark Osman, farm manager at Royal Farms in Berkshire, west of London, are those facing the agriculture industry globally.
Low commodity prices, pressure on land availability due to increased urban sprawl and tightening compliance regulations, nominated by Mr Osman as key issues to overcome, are familiar concepts to many farming in Australia.
The Royal Farms business is attempting to increase profitability by focusing on value adding and premium markets, primarily through the Windsor Farm Shop, which sells high end meat and farm products.
The Royal Farms are part of the broader Windsor Estate, which covers just under 10,000ha.
The majority of the estate is owned by the Crown, representing English tax payers, but the Royal Family is the tenant on a 1250ha segment which makes up Royal Farms.
The land varies from friable drift deposits formed at the end of the end of the Ice Age to heavier clay soils with an average rainfall of 600mm.
The Royal Farms business is truly mixed, featuring beef cattle, meat sheep, a dairy, pigs, poultry and an arable component.
One income stream less familiar to Australian eyes is the hunting business, with a number of pheasants and partridges released to be hunted in the winter.
“It is interesting, within some of our winter crops you have to make provision with the row spacings to ensure the hunting dogs can get through easily,” Mr Osman said.
The 1100 head, primarily Sussex breed, beef herd supplies meat to the farm shop, which has between 6500 to 7000 customers a week and turns over £50,000 a week in cash sales.
Mr Osman said between four and five finished cattle were provided to the butchery a week, with a carcase weight of between 340-350kg.
“The Sussex isn’t a big breed and we can’t put anything much bigger through the butchery anyway.”
There is a focus on getting the most out of every carcase.
“The measure between a good and a bad butcher is about 3 per cent,” Mr Osman said.
“On a 350kg carcase that works out at 10.5kg of meat, and working off £4/kg, you’re looking at a man’s wages in wastage.”
He said the challenge was to find a home for the less popular cuts.
“We could sell out of fillets and sirloin every day of the week, but it is about making use of the other cuts, so we do things like make around a tonne and a half of sausages a week, along with 50 to 60 hams.”
The Sussex breed are a brown line with deep chests and short legs and are descended from native oxen.
“They have been here ever since the farm started,” Mr Osman said.
In terms of lambs, up to 70 a week can be turned off, with a Texel ram going over Scottish Mule ewes.
There is a 150 sow pig operation along with 1500 hens, which produce 350 dozen eggs a week and a 200 cow Jersey dairy herd.
Outside of that, there is around 400ha of crops each year and 800ha of grasslands and woods, including ancient hay meadows grazed for hundreds of years.
The cropping rotation features wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape, along with winter fodder crops such as forage turnips.
“Given the low grain prices at present, the arable component is there to value add the livestock enterprise with feed and straw and to provide a rotational option,” Mr Osman said.
“At present, we’d describe ourselves as a livestock farm with an arable unit.”
It is not just the grain side of the business where low prices are a concern.
“Even if milk prices doubled tomorrow, we would still struggle,” Mr Osman said.
“There are 500 million consumers who drink milk every day within 1000 miles (1600km) yet it is still not enough.”
The dairy farm also has the weighty concern of producing milk and cream to grace the royal table each day.
“The Royal Family get milk and cream delivered from the farm each day wherever they are staying.”
In terms of the value adding side of the business, Mr Osman said while some of the property was ran on organic lines, none of the products were sold as organic.
“We are already extracting a premium for the products that go through the shop, we found there was no extra value to be gained by pushing for certification.”
Dealing with a largely urban population and their perception of farming is also a unique challenge.
“We get a lot of people through here, that’s the nature of the beast, there were 33,000 people walking through the open park that is part of the farm on a weekend before Christmas last year and there are 10 million people living within 30 miles of this property.”
“With that, we have to deal with perceptions, I had 63 phone calls regarding a distressed cow when we trialed outdoor calving.”
“The cattle themselves would be quite happy outside in the paddock with turnips and some straw, but they are generally housed as the public don’t understand they are quite fine outside in the winter.”
With guards on the gates on the way to the dairy and planes conducting surveillance over the farm before major public events, Royal Farms is always going to be a different place to work, but Mr Osman says the fundamentals are the same.
“At the end of the day I am working for people who are very knowledgeable and very passionate about agriculture.”
· Gregor Heard travelled to England as a guest of Syngenta as part of the Syngenta Growth Awards.
