Regenerative farmer Matt stars on ITV’s Love Your Weekend

If you watched ITV’s Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh on Sunday, you may have spotted a familiar face. 

Our tenant Matt Elphick, who runs Nutfield Dairy at Brays Farm in Surrey took one of his beautiful rare breed Dairy Shorthorn cows, Marshmallow, and her calf, Ethel, to meet Alan, and share his passion for regenerative farming. 

Matt Elphick on ITV's Love Your Weekend

Matt Elphick with Alan Titchmarsh

Matt told Alan about his journey as a first-generation farmer. 

He said: “Cows get a lot of bad press but it’s not the cow, it’s the how. It’s how we farm them.

“Farming regeneratively like this we are really mimicking a herd of wild herbivores, so we are moving the cows regularly, we’re not overgrazing and we’re grazing in a way that really promotes and encourages biodiversity.” 

Alan was impressed to hear Matt and his partner Betsie move the cows to a new area to graze every day. 

Matt explained the farm is split up into about 30 paddocks. 

“Each paddock gets a rest for 30 days to enable the plants to have a natural lifecycle, to flower, to re-seed," Matt said.

Matt said it’s very positive as he uses the natural ecology rather than man-made inputs to look after the cows. 

“With insects and dung beetles, they are nature’s parasite control. They are reducing our worm burden, our fly burden, we don’t worm them, we don’t use insecticides like pour-on fly repellents. If we did that, those insects couldn’t thrive in the soil.”

Marshmallow and Ethel meet Alan Titchmarsh

Matt Elphick and Alan Titchmarsh

Matt told Alan about birds-foot-trefoil, which has natural anti-worming properties, and which he encourages to grow.

“We are really looking for no inputs at all in our farming method system,” he said. “The soil is so important. We want to create a landscape where the Carbon dioxide (CO2) can be taken out of the atmosphere down into the soil where it’s beneficial, it’s going to feed soil microbes. It’s affecting our health because our food is only as good as the soil from which it’s derived and it dictates whether or not we have a healthy-functioning eco-system.”