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 In 2005 English Nature (the former name of Natural England) published the paper The importance of livestock grazing for wildlife conservation, which detailed the concerns over the changes to farm support at the time which took away production subsidies and replaced them with simplified land area payments. This move meant that farmers no longer needed to produce anything from the land to receive the payment, which was made available simply to own agricultural land. It was anticipated that this would result in reduced grazing of biodiverse grasslands and the subsequent gradual decline of grassland biodiversity.

One of the most common questions I am asked is whether our beef is grassfed. At Rosewood Farm we produce 100% grassfed beef as a by-product of conservation. That means that our animals graze pastures and meadows throughout the summer and autumn and are fed hay and/or silage made from grass during the late Winter and early Spring when grass growth is naturally slower. The conservation element comes from the fact that as well as producing beef our animals are grazing with the aim of encouraging and preserving botanical diversity in the pastures. This means that our pastures are not...

I don't think 2020 requires any introduction; Covid-19 brought both globalism and food supply into sharp focus for many as supply chains struggled to cope with a demand surge created by the uncertainty that many people were feeling as pandemic gathered pace. Nothing had actually happened to our food supply, but people’s natural instinct to hoard supplies highlighted the fragility of the system that now provides the vast majority of our needs on a need-not-know basis. We had become so used to walking into a vast superstore and being able to source from a vast array of foods and other...

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...