Latest News

Find out all the latest news on what we have been up to here at E W Davies Farms.

Maize harvesting

Despite the very dry spring and slow start to the crops growth, once we did get some rain the crop very quickly compensated and soon caught up with its growth. Yields were about ...

Rape Drilling

After a few years of not growing any rape we thought that with the conditions at the end of August it would be a good opportunity to plant straight into a grass field that was ...

Soya Beans

This year we took part in a project with a farmer from Suffolk and a farmer from Norfolk looking at ways to make soya a viable crop to grow in the UK. We spent a lot of time ...

Maize drilling

This spring saw the arrival of a new Vaderstad Tempo precision planter.  We will be using the machine to plant a whole range of different crops. Sugar Beet, Maize, Soya and rape. We ...

Rams running with the ewes

The rams have been running with our ewes throughout June and the start of July. This year we have added two new ram lambs into the flock. Both of them including Blackhill Bart ...

First load of fat pigs leave The Hydes

Early one morning in mid July, Josh and his team were up sorting through the pigs to send the first 150 onto a lorry. This was a very proud day for Josh to see his first start ...

The crops are growing

With the drier than normal winter we have been able to get on very well with our spring work load. All of our spring cereal crops were planted by the middle of March with most ...

Sugar beet drilling

With spring arriving, the soils warmed up enough to allow us to plant our sugar beet. This is an exciting time of the year for us as it is effectively the second crop of the ...

Pigs at The Hydes

Through the winter we undertook a new project at The Hydes constructing a new building. The building is purpose built for very high welfare pig rearing, we will be contract ...

Harvest 2018

As with last harvest the dry weather through June ripened the crops prematurely and resulted in a very early harvest. Unlike last year when the weather turned as soon as the ...

Hedgerow planting

100 years ago, the landscape at The Hydes would have looked a little different to the large open fields that we have today. Many of the big fields would have been divided into ...

Lambs reach weight in record time.

Despite the rather harsh conditions that we have experienced at times this winter, the lambs have grown exceptionally well and we have achieved our targeted weight of 42kg in ...

Maintaining the farms hedges

With harvest and autumn drilling all done for the year now, our attentions turn to some of the other jobs that are required to maintain the farm. One of those jobs is to manage the ...

Lambing update

For the first week of November our ewes were giving birth to their lambs at a nice steady pace with about three or four lambing per day. Once we got into the second and third ...

Lambing 2017

On the 31st October we got the lambing shed ready so that we could bring the ewes in the next morning. Once they were all in and settled in we didn't have to wait very long, the ...

Sugar Beet harvest

On Tuesday 10th October the contractors came to lift our 31 ha of sugar beet. They brought two harvesters with them so that they could get the job done quickly to enable us to ...

One month until lambing starts

Just one month left now until these girls are due to start lambing again, why not come along with your family and meet some of the new born lambs. More details on our events page 

Autumn drilling is underway

As harvest 17 becomes a distant memory our attentions have very much turned to getting next years crop in the ground. We started our autumn drilling campaign with our only field of ...

A new year starts with Writtle College

Every autumn we start a program with Agriculture students at Writtle College where we show them some of our farming methods at different stages of the growing season. In the past ...

Harvest 2017

Harvest has been a real stop/start affair this year so far. We have managed to keep chipping away at it in between the rain and we are about 50% of the way through it. The ...

Rams have done their job

Anyone that came to see our farm on Open Farm Sunday would have noticed that our four rams were wearing a harness ready for being put in with our ewes. The rams have been with ...

LEAF Demonstration Farm

On Friday 7th July we were launched as an official LEAF Demonstration Farm. Will Gemmill National Head of Farming for Strutt and Parker preformed the ceremonial tree planting to ...