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This is the story of our meadows, a story that goes back millions of years, the earlier part of which I’ve covered in previous blogs so I’ll pick this tale up in modern times. If you’ve take any interest in conservation and wildlife in the British Isles over the last 20 years you’ll no doubt have come across the statistic that an estimated 97% of our ‘unimproved’ grasslands have been lost in England & Wales between 1930 and 1984. Whether that figure has increased or not since the 1980’s is largely immaterial, it’s still a lot, and we’re no where...

I’ve been promising you all that the next blog was going to be about land & rewilding ever since I wrote the last one - that’s still coming but sometimes you read something that is too inspiring not to share. 'Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer', by Chris Newman is based upon the US but applies just the same here in the UK. There is a lot to take from this piece, it is honest and may be hard to accept for many but is full of truth, particularly the following is extract; I think, with the exception of paying employees/relying upon...

Climate change has been at the top of the agenda with the Extinction Rebellion protests in London and the school climate strikes happening across the globe, and now with David Attenborough getting in on the act with ‘The Facts about Climate Change’ airing we know something will happen, as it did with plastic awareness. I know when climate change is being discussed because, as a cattle grazier, I find that the hateful messages on social media tend to reach their peak. Some people, often with very anonymous SM accounts feel justified in lambasting me for not caring or, as was...

It was on the 25th March this year when I noticed, via Twitter, that a farm in Wales had begun mowing organic grass for silage. If you’re not familiar with the farming calendar, that’s very early, and with our focus on ground nesting birds I shared the news to point out that often the increase in birds of prey is blamed for the Curlew being in trouble, but in fact one of the greatest threats to the birds come from more intensive land use, mechanisation and earlier cutting of grass for silage, which was certainly the case for the demise...

Overgrazing is one of those words I’m hearing more & more as time goes on, and it’s begun to make me cringe every time I hear it. It’s a popular criticism of livestock farming but it’s overuse seems to have changed the meaning of the word towards any land management that is less than optimal for wildlife. In recent months I’ve seen ‘overgrazing’ used to refer to everything from severely undergrazed pastures to land that wasn’t grazed at all. Of course the obvious solution would appear to be to graze fewer and fewer animals on the land. While this may...