Clive Bailye
Third generation arable farmer at Hammerwich. Founder of The Farming Forum, Direct Driller and Agigence, and someone who speaks up for farming in the national press and with the people who make policy.
Clive Bailye farms at Hammerwich near Lichfield, where his grandfather and father farmed before him. He came back from Harper Adams in 1997 to light land and a farm whose dairy herd had already gone, and built an arable business on it. Everything else he has done has grown out of that.
He moved the farm to direct drilling more than twenty years ago, when it was still regarded as a gamble on sandy Staffordshire soil, and has run it without cultivations ever since. The business has been built on cost discipline rather than scale for its own sake, growing through tenancies and contract and share farming agreements with neighbouring landowners. Along the way the farm has run a haulage company, a livery yard, a shooting ground and a large grain handling and storage business serving merchants and other farmers. It was among the first UK farms to sell independently certified regenerative carbon credits and it hosts trials for independent research organisations. His view of farm economics is blunt. Profit matters more than gross margin, fixed costs matter more than yield, and a farm should stand on its own feet.
In 2012 he started an online forum for direct drillers because nowhere else was having the conversation in any depth. It became The Farming Forum in 2013 and is now the largest farming website in Europe and one of the most visited in the world, serving more than a million adverts a day to a readership that covers a large share of British farmers every month. Direct Driller magazine followed in 2017. Both sit within Agri Web Media, the farming media business he founded, which also runs Farm Classifieds and Tech Farmer.
The forum gives him a daily, unfiltered read on what thousands of working farmers actually think. He has spent thirteen years reading what they say, and most of his opinions start there.
He has run the farm on data since yield mapping first arrived, and was among the first British farmers to put an AI agent to work on his own business. In 2026 he founded Agigence, which builds AI products for farmers. Its first product, Farm Assist, is in trials with Defra ADOPT funding, and Farmers Weekly reported in October 2026 on how the agent planned and submitted TWB Farms' Sustainable Farming Incentive application. More on AI in farming.
Clive is a regular contributor on farming to GB News, the BBC, ITV, Sky, Times Radio and Radio 4's Farming Today, and is quoted regularly in The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Spectator and Farmers Weekly. He co presented Defra's own podcast on the Sustainable Farming Incentive with Janet Hughes in 2021, putting Farming Forum members' questions to the department. He was one of the organisers of the November 2024 farmer rally in Westminster over the changes to agricultural inheritance tax relief, and has since briefed the Treasury and MPs from across the parties on farm policy. He has kept that work independent of any one institution. Selected appearances and articles.
Clive takes on a small number of non executive, advisory and consultancy appointments. He has farmed arable and run grain storage, haulage, livery and property businesses. He has run companies for nearly thirty years, including buying a failing business out of liquidation and turning it round. Building The Farming Forum and Agigence has given him a working knowledge of digital media, marketing and technology, and he can explain all of it on television, in print or across a boardroom table. He understands the pressures on farmers because he shares them, and he says what he thinks.
He speaks at farming and industry events in the UK and abroad on conservation agriculture, farm business, policy and AI in farming, from his own farm and his own numbers. Past audiences include the Oxford Farming Conference, Groundswell, Cereals, Croptech, the Farm Carbon Toolkit, AHDB Monitor Farms, the NFU, the Food Ethics Council, BASF, Syngenta, Defra, Strutt and Parker, Savills and farmer groups across Europe.
Away from the farm, most of his time goes on family. He lives at Hammerwich with his wife Donna, a sculptor, and their two sons, and the four of them have travelled widely together. Motorsport has been the other constant for nearly thirty years: circuit racing, rallying and desert rallying, competing to international level. He has shot at national and international level and flies helicopters.
Recognition
Broadcast and press
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