We Farm Differently
It was the Summer of Love back in 1968 when the first cows stepped off the lorry and we started our very own family dairy herd here at Pengreep.
Forty years later, the descendants of those first cows still graze the fields. The original black and white British Friesians have been reinvigorated with Jersey and Ayrshire bloodlines from New Zealand for the last 18 years.
While this raised a few eyebrows amongst the purists, it was all part of our plan changing to a 100% grass fed herd that produces rich, creamy, high protein milk entirely from grazed grass and forbs...just the way Nature intended.
One of the great bonuses of our cows being allowed the diet they co-evolved over millennia to eat, is that their health, longevity and fertility improved dramatically over the industry's declining standards.
It's not stretching the imagination too far to conclude that healthier animals produce food of a higher nutritional content that is the essential precursor to good health and vitality.
Indeed, increasing amounts of research is backing this contention up. You only have to look at the work on Omega 3:Omega 6 Fatty acids ratios of grass fed vs grain fed animals and how this links into creating the conditions that pre-dispose consumers to inflammatory diseases such as heart disease and arthritis to see there's a point to this.
Of course Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, probably had the first and last word on this when he counselled; "Let you food be your medicine, and let your medicine be your food."
So how we address this in our farming is going to be the subject of our blog in the months to come...
Improving Pasture Quality
You Are What You Eat has become a wellworn catchphrase of late, entering the nation’s psyche to the extent that, besides becoming a best seller, the book of the same name and TV show recently topped the list of most loaned work of non-fiction in UK libraries.
