Successfully completed Dr. Elaine Igham's soil food web foundation course as well as completing the certified Lab-tech program.

After 20 months managing the Langmead farming business its time to move on to pastures new, a big thank you to all at Langmeads who have made me feel so welcome. I wish Duncan More all the best in his new role at Langmeads.

In the past 6 years, I managed a major restructuring exercise of a large diverse farming estate. From this exercise I implemented a 10-year business strategy and review program which was essential to allow the business to develop in a turbulent agricultural sector, this enabled us to benefit from positive swings in markets and give some certainty on farm dividends.As part of the strategy we completed a 26,000-tonne grain store and dryer, the store recently became a futures store guaranteeing us an 8% return. I also secured grant funding and built a 85mg reservoir, as well as linking three existing irrigation systems and introducing drip irrigation to the estate to secure water for all six of our growers on the estate as well as opening a further 300 ha of veg land. We built a firewood business which turned over 100k utilising wood from the estate as well as generating wood chip for our 2 boilers. Organic cattle numbers doubled on the estate on a reduced area of the farm by understanding soil and cattle diets utilising rotations and getting the team to buy in to attention to detail.During these 6 years I took full responsibility for a 2,000 acre farm in Tuscany and several management trips to Argentina.

I managed a 2,700 ha arable farm and farmed a further 600ha on contract for the Co-Operative Group. Whilst managing this estate we utilised inherited surplus machine capacity at our Down Ampney estate which reduced our fixed cost on both estates and maximised the farm machinery efficiency.Whilst in the role I recruited and trained 30 harvest students for the Co-operative Group these where offered to the other business units.My wife and I set up an education project for schools in the East Midlands. In the first year of the project we had over 1,500 children visit the farm. By 2014 the project had expanded to 9 other co-operative farms around the UK and celebrated 100,000th child visiting the project. As part of this project, I spent 3 weeks in Ghana filming an educational video which showed children how Coco is grown and processed to make chocolate.My 15 years of large scale practical farming took place in several locations while with the co-operative group (Farmcare)