Farming & Food

Grass provides the perfect diet for cattle and sheep. It is all they need to produce nutritious, healthy meat for people to cook and eat.

But grass can be tricky to manage. Its one aim in life is to grow, produce a seed head and then die. Only skilled grassland farmers can manage it to produce high quality animal food throughout the year – grazed out in the fields or given as conserved winter-feed, either dried as hay or pickled as silage.

The people I write about in these blogs are some of the best and most innovative farmers and chefs in the world. They look after their soils, their land and their animals and take great care to source and prepare the best meat possible. We should be proud of them all.

Nuffield conference snapshot

The Nuffield Farming Scholarships Trusts annual conference was held this year in Belfast. I was up for the Steven and Gillian Bullock Award – for the scholar who has done most with their award ten years on, but it was also a great way to check up on the exploits of...

Maintaining a resilient dairy business

It was great to see Paul Bird the other day, the first New Zealand grassland consultant to set up discussion groups here, and encouraging dairy farmers to stop using feeder wagons and produce more milk from grazed grass.

‘British’ style swards are boosting Finland’s silage yields

Three years ago, Finnish grassland consultants Anu Ellä and Jarkko Storberg came to Britain looking for ways to make their farmers’ fields more productive. The traditional timothy/fescue silage leys in Finland are hardy enough to stand up to harsh winters and deep...

Grass-based dairy farming is more enjoyable and makes a decent return

Keeping 880 cows on a grass-based system and milking them once a day, is far more enjoyable and makes more money, than having half the number of cows and milking them three, or even two times a day. So says Gavin Green – and he should know.

Death of grass = the end of civilisation?

Imagine if all plants of the Gramineae (or Poaceae) family in the world turned brown, rotted and died, falling victim to a virus that scientists failed to curb. No wheat, barley, rice or maize, no grass for grazing so no cattle or sheep – just potatoes, vegetables and fish left to feed a global population. No lawns, parks, football pitches, verges – well not as we know them now.

British grass-fed beef is part of the Steak [R]evolution

I was excited to be invited to the UK debut screening of Steak [R]evolution in London last week. This follows the search of documentary film director Franck Ribière and famous French butcher Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, for the best steak in the world.