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 Tips and Trees It’s been a difficult winter at Rosewood, not least because the summer was so wet, then the rain came early and relentlessly over the winter months, as they did in many parts of the country this year. One thing that wet weather does is to focus one’s mind on the future and how to cope with the challenges we face. As I wrote back in 2019, the climate is changing and if the intervening five years have shown us anything it’s that the pace of change is accelerating rapidly with warmer, wetter winters coming as a direct...

‘Winter for the livestock farmer is something to be survived, a time of relentless work needing to be done, and of equally relentless expenditure’

The above passage from Roger Morgan-Grenville’s Taking Stock; A journey among cows sums up well how I’m feeling at the moment. It’s the end of May, Spring is here, the trees and hedgerows are bursting with life and the birds are nesting and the relief of finally turning out the cattle is palpable. As I reflect upon what winter does to the heart and bank balance, I’m left wondering, is it really worth going through another one?

 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...