Stories from the farm July 26

Some of the cows enjoying a high welfare pool party during the recent hot weather.

Link to the order form below the newsletter.

Newsletter by Laurel:

Words, words, words. I quite like them. Somewhere between prose and poetry is probably my happy spot with a decent smattering of nonsense scattered around for preference. Frivolous or powerful and endlessly nuanced. Take for instance: Routine practice vs Mutilation. They're both used to describe the same farm tasks but how powerfully different the words leave one feeling. I'm talking about some of things that we as farmers do to animals as part of husbandry. Actions such as tail docking, teeth clipping, castration, beak clipping and de-horning. The farming industry tends to view them as routine practices, animal welfare interests see them as activities that should be regulated against. When we were first converting the farm to organic 20 years ago and I was working my way through the book of standards and regulations, I reached this section and these practices were termed Mutilations and it flipped an already sensitive view of animals up and over and landed it in an altogether new place. It placed the individual animal front and centre and required me to justify why I wanted to perform any of these mutilations on it. Intense stuff.
So I spend rather a lot of time amongst farm jobs taking erratic detours around fields staring at the plants, thinking, wondering, learning. And every now and then, even from quite early in the spring I get jolted out of my visual absorption by a burst of fragrance. A delicious floral scent always needs locating and sniffing some more so the eyes come up and the nose twitches as I try to locate it. It's the smell of thistle blossom (attractive to a great range of insects as well as me). Only it's early spring, the thistles aren't nearly out yet. But there's nothing in bloom that has a scent. And it is coming from the thistles, some of which are covered in an orange fungal rust. I'm on my knees now in a thistle clump, sniffing infected and non infected thistle plants. The infected plants smell absolutely delicious!

Happily we aren't confronted with having to justify ourselves very often. Intensive systems, limiting animals opportunities to express natural behaviours, tend to be the operations which in turn require the most mutilations to mitigate displacement behaviours. We are in contrast, by choice, an extensive system. We do however perform one, which is castration of male lambs and calves and this is currently subject to an animal welfare review with a likely outcome being to regulate against current methods. Can we avoid it completely? I've thought this through so many times over the years and in the system we run (mixed age, mixed sex groups, longer than standard lifespans, slow growing breeds) I see no way round it. With a sex ratio at birth around parity, having so many young bulls and young rams within our system would be chaos. In very fast growing breeds (killed pre sexual maturity) or large single age and sex groups grown on separately, it would be an option. That would require a fundamental change in the farm and our ethos.

So, a compromise. We do castrate all young male animals. Historically using a rubber ring/band applied within the first week of life. This is one of the practices being reviewed amid concerns of unacceptable levels of pain for some animals. The review has yet to report but two new options for less impactful methods of castration have this year reached the market. So we have changed to one of these new methods this year. It's more time consuming to use and significantly more expensive but our impression so far is that the impact on the animals is noticeably less. This is good. It is also approved to use on animals up to a few weeks old which has great benefits for us in our outdoor extensive lambing system in not having to catch lambs for application of rings during the middle of lambing.

It's not an easy subject. And not an easy thing to do. But it's good to face it and understand what we do and justify why. I suspect the welfare review will outlaw the old methods in due course and this will be a good thing and Uk welfare standards will have progressed. My only grumble with it will be, I don't imagine for a minute that they will require importations of lamb to the UK from around the world, raised under a lower welfare standards, to raise their game...

UPDATED ORDER FORM ONLINE NOW

The July order form is now updated and online. You can find the link below to the order form with all our different meat cuts available, along with practical info about delivery/collection dates.