BUSINESS ON THE FARM


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ON THE FARM WITH RICH AT RISBURY


Each month Richard Thomas will join us to talk about life on his family farm in North Herefordshire, where they farm beef, sheep, arable and apples. Their ethos is to try to farm in a more regenerative style for the benefit of future generations.


There is a saying from a farmer in the USA, ‘normal is just a setting on a dryer’. What is normal? There is no such thing as normal, and perhaps even more so in this day of labels and no labels and diversity there is no normal because we're all different. Diversity is what perhaps makes people and life so interesting. With that in mind and bringing it back to the farm I have a continual internal dialogue about how to manage our grass.


April into May and then into June always (eventually) brings warmth and usually lots of growth. The farm always seems to go from just enough grass, to ‘oh my goodness, what are we going to do with all this grass?’. Now, of course, it is the excess grass that we harvest as hay, or silage and conserve for winter, but you can’t do that with all the excess, because the stock need something to eat now and for the next few weeks while the fields you cut grow back.


So how to manage that excess? What is the ‘normal’ thing to do? Well, grazing high covers, so tall you can’t see the sheep is probably not normal. In fact it’s probably quite frowned upon for various reasons. The lambs can occasionally get sore feet from long grass, tall stalky grass isn’t particularly palatable, and generally


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sheep turn their nose up at forage of this kind. Except they don’t, if you manage it well enough.


I am giving the sheep the choice. They can eat the available leaves and the seed heads, which they love and then move on to the next field. Crucially, not making them eat the stems. There isn’t much nutrition in the stems anyway.


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