We are working to make our farm something more wild. More wildflowers. More diversity. More alive above and below the ground. For lots of reasons. Because it’s more sustainable. Because it makes a kind of economic sense. Because it makes for better food. Because it makes for healthier, more fertile, and cleaner soil. And it will make for healthier livestock.
We are aiming at cultivating wildflower meadow. This is not the conventional approach to raising sheep. The conventional approach is to plow up your wildflowers, or poison them, and sow with ryegrass and clover. Fertilise with chemicals. Graze for a few years. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Wildflower meadow is a lot more sustainable than a field you plow up, spray, and seed with rye grass and clover. It’s diverse. It supports a lot more flora and fauna. For wildflower meadow, all that’s needed is that you do the right kind of nothing for long enough. There’s no agrichemicals. No fertilisers or roundup. No weedkiller or insecticide. No plough. No poison.
We are going to manage our land using managed rotational grazing. We split our fields into small sections. Small enough so we have about 14 paddocks, that we graze for two or three days at a time. Meaning that, at any one time, over 90 per cent of our land has no animal grazing it. Giving the pasture time to recover. Grow deeper roots. Build soil fertility naturally. Giving plants other than rye and clover a chance to grow. Flower. Reproduce. Thrive.It will give us a healthier pasture. It will help us conserve bio diversity, giving grass time to build it’s root system under the ground, and with it all the insect and bug life that that brings. . Building the flora and fauna above and below ground naturally, giving us a healthier, more natural ecosystem to graze off. Working with the land and the ecosystem. Not against it. And the animals will ferilise the fields. No need for chemical fertilisers.
It also means more content, easier handled, more trusting stock. We will be in the fields every day. Measuring grass, filling buckets, moving animals from paddock to paddock every few days. Spending time with the stock, a lot time, moving them to sweeter pasture, setting up fences, will give us a better, easier relationship.
There is some loss of efficiency. Pure ryegrass and clover is protein rich. Stock grow faster, put on more muscle, get to market quicker. But the trade off is worth it for us. A healthy, balanced diverse pasture is a long term legacy. A thing worth doing. And it makes a different kind of economic sense. Because we can manage it just with managed, careful grazing. And no money down on agrochemicals.
We have a zero agrcohemical policy. No chemical fertilisers. No weedkillers. No insecticides. No herbicides.
Our livestock are what they eat. A complex mix of wild grasses and flowers, bush and bramble leaves, and the riot of wild things that can be foraged in our fields adds complexity, depth and flavour to the meat we produce.
When you farm like this, using managed intensive or rotational grazing, what you farm is your soil, and whats beneath your soil. You want a thriving jungle of flora and fauna under your feet. You want deep roots. You want diversity. Because that’s where your soil fertility is. It’s in the work you put in, not in the chemicals you spread.
And you do that by spending time managing your pasture carefully to make it more wild, deeper rooted and diverse, rather than spending money making it shallow rooted, tamed, more dead and monocultural.
We want a better tasting product. We want healthier stock. We want wildflower and wilderness and fauna and flora. We want rippling green doted with the red and yellow and pink and purple of wild things. And we want to do that with zero chemical input. Zero.
So, from this year, we are managing our grazing. Moving animals every few days, dividing everything into small paddocks, grazing sensitively, and creating a context where at any one time, over 90 per cent of our land has nothing grazing it during the growing months.
We have primroses here. Wild bluebells. Speedwell. Marsh Marigolds hiding their gold in the tumbling down edges of ditches. Tall Flag Iris blowsy. Wood Anenome and Cranes Bill. Speedwell, Bramble and early Purple Orchids. The Meadowseet, the Angelica, the Ragged Robin and the Devils Bit will come as summer arrives.
Long live the weeds, and the wilderness yet.
