Dairy cows, goats & horses off out for a day’s grazing outside the Romanian village of Viscri. @PastureForLife study tour. Real farmers/farms but will increasing tourism change this?
Every week the cattle herds stay outside saves £500-700 in potential wintering costs
Out wintering (done properly with planned grazing prep) has done more for our farm’s profitability than anything else we’ve ever done
That is likely to be the last green grass any of our cows see this year. The rest of our cattle pastures look like the third photo. We will have to start feeding straw/hay out to them from now on. This is the driest myself and my parents have ever seen the farm in our careers. #Drought2025
Our permanent pasture is really struggling now, but we still have a tiny wedge of grass left ahead of the cattle. Post grazing the grass is just burning off, as you can see in the post below. It will take a considerable amount of rain now to get things going again. #Drought2025
If you are learning grasses this year, then July is the month for doing Agrostis. It is not the most difficult genus, but it is undoubtledly the most fiddly (and therefore the most frequently neglected; it's just too much like hard work).
Belties might just be the most functionally effective breed in Britain
This year’s calving:
100% unassisted births
100% live/healthy calves
100% good mothers
0 meds/drugs
0 bought feed
0 housed
0 losses
It’s been like this pretty much every year - they are awesome cattle
Big move 1.5km down the road for the mob last night - the calves were amazing and have really got used to having to get on and follow the herd.
Moving to a new farm is hard, but when you’ve got a cow team like this it’s definitely much easier! 🐮❤️
First hay cut. A diverse SSSI meadow. Vegetation waste deep across a wide area but after 2 wet winters the reed, meadow sweet and wet loving thugs are very dominant. Early cuts will attempt to address this. #hay
24 days between pictures, and since that part of the field was last grazed. In a normal year that grass would have grown back to knee height in that time period. This year it’s not even managed ankle height. The drought is starting to bite hard. Glad to have Hereford cattle, who are very efficient feed converters and won’t be fazed by the lack of grass on offer to them!
Definitely seeing that the fields we’ve added the most soil organic matter to (with AMP grazing) are proving more resilient
Lambing sheep fields taking the worst hit as bare when this began - which is a poor grazing strategy but hard to avoid on a sheep farm
A huge Thank You to @Dylancastellior, Wyn and the team at Castellior - what a fantastic Winners’ Farm Walk! Over 100 people attended to hear about self-sufficient, sustainable beef production.
Thanks to competition sponsors @wearegerminal@NufarmUK@Yara_UK, and to @abpukagri
📍A powerful new report from the @SusFoodTrust gets to the heart of what Pasture for Life is all about and challenges the widespread belief that meat and dairy products from cattle and sheep are always part of the problem.
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What fab evening. Thought I better see how the fritillaries were doing.
About 100 currently in flower, lots more to come.
Won’t be doing anything in here until haymaking in June/july
#floodplainmeadows#beef
🏆 PfL member James Newhouse of PfL certified Megs Farm in Yorkshire is the featured front cover article in @FarmersGuardian this month.
5 years ago, entrant farmer James knew little about regenerative livestock farming. But by learning from other PfL members, James now...