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.
Lauren’s paintings of cows are a big hit with me!
I am hanging up my Christmas present today – a gorgeous original painting from Lauren Terry of Lauren’s Cows – www.laurenscows.com. I stumbled upon this bright and lively bovine collection while messing about on Twitter.
New issue of Grass & Forage Farmer out now!
The winter issue of the British Grassland Society (BGS) magazine Grass and Forage Farmer has just been published – the 111th issue since its re-launch in 1977 as Grass Farmer. The ‘Forage’ bit was added in 2005 to acknowledge the contribution crops like legumes, maize and wholecrop cereals now make to ruminant diets. In the early days, it was known as the Local Societies News Sheet – a handy communication channel for the fledgling network of grassland groups springing up around the country. It was, and still remains the practical sister to the Society’s learned scientific journal Grass and Forage Science.
Grassland management – art or science?
At a recent workshop run by the Advanced Training Partnership (ATP), which is currently delivering postgraduate distance learning for people working in the agri-food industry (www.atp-pasture.org.uk), Dr Iwan Owen of IBERS gave a great précis of UK grassland farming.
The Pasture-Fed Livestock Association ready to welcome new farmer members
Well done to the UK’s Pasture-Fed Livestock Association for getting everything in place (on the tightest of budgets) to allow producers who feed only grass and conserved forage, to market their meat under the new PASTORAL brand.
Even the best can keep on learning about grass!
Northern Ireland beef producer Sam Chesney is riding high as last year’s Farmers Weekly Beef Farmer of the Year, and making it to the final of the British Grassland Society’s National Grassland Management Competition this year.
But, as 160 farmers heard at a recent Ulster Grassland Society farm walk, he is always looking for ways to improve still further.
Lessons learned from BGS Summer Meeting to South West Wales
This year’s British Grassland Society Summer Meeting was a cracker – with visits to eight farms managed by inspirational farmers making the most of the natural resources around them – sunshine (not so much this year), rainfall and land that grows good grass.