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Organic Whole Lamb fully butchered
Special Offer
Price: £140.00 (each) RRP £162
A whole carcass butchered into 2 x whole leg on the bone, 2 x whole shoulders on the bone, 2 x rack, approx. 12 x loin chops, 1 x breast on the bone and approx 6 x boneless chump steaks. Order online now.
Grass-fed livestock… animals that the Lancet forgot!
A government u-turn was swiftly undertaken yesterday, following a report published in The Lancet. Embarrasing conflicts of opinion emerged from different UK goverment departments.
The health department funded a study which proposed we should eat less meat, to reduce numbers of ruminant livestock (which belch out methane, a powerful greenhouse gas) and therefore counteract the health hazards of both climate change, and heart disease!
Alan Dangour, one of the authors of the report and a senior lecturer at the London School of School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that a dramatic change could be made without giving up meat.
“We are not saying become vegetarian, we are just saying cut back on the amount of meat and meat products you eat.” “Even cutting back by a third, as we suggest, would still mean that the average adult was still eating one meat based meal every day.”
The report recommended cutting ruminant livestock by almost one-third, saying this would allow the agricultural sector to meet its share of targets to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030.
Defra, however, had not been consulted. They have now pointed out that British farmers won’t be happy about the idea of less livestock in the UK. They also highlight the fact that cutting Britain’s cattle and sheep should not necessarily be prioritised ahead of reductions in the more damaging phenomenon of rainforest-clearance beef herds in tropical regions.
James Landale reports that Defra had to act to calm worried farmers: ‘A senior official sent out an email telling them not to worry about the Lancet report: “This, as we know, rather over-simplifies a complex issue and I don’t think that Andy Burnham has actually said anything that supports the headline that govt supports a 30% reduction in farm animals.”’
The Soil Association’s report on soil carbon, released today, shows that grass-fed livestock has a critical role to play in minimising carbon emissions from farming – which should be set against the methane emissions from cattle and sheep. This is because grasslands for grazing livestock represent vitally important carbon stores.
Grass-fed animals on permanent pastures in Britain are far more sustainable than grain-fed livestock in the USA, for example. Therefore eating less meat is too simple a concept. It is more important than ever to choose carefully where your meat comes from. Read more about grass-fed livestock…
We’ve made a shortened version of this video for a new webcasting TV station, called the Local Food Channel.
Special Offer…
Price: £300.00 (each)
A whole carcase, butchered into 4 x 2.5kg leg on the bone, 4 x 2.5kg rolled leg, 4 x 2.5kg shoulder on the bone, 4 x 2.5kg shoulder boned and rolled, 2 x 3kg belly on the bone, 30 x loin chops.
Special Offer for a limited time only! Only £300, RRP £425
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Juliet starred in this article in The Telegraph today.
Interview by Hattie Ellis. Photograph by Brijesh Patel.
We run the farm on the principle of working with nature. It’s through observing the birds’ behaviour that every year we add another ingredient to what we do.
Turkeys are so sociable, they love human beings. They immediately come towards you. They have three different calls and when I mimic their ‘Hello, how are you?’ voice they all make it back.
Turkeys are omnivores. It’s important that they get out there and eat worms and so on. You see them chase insects. They eat a lot of our grain from the farm and have unlimited green stuff because they are good foragers. Their feed has no genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in it – there’s a terrible problem with GMOs in animal feed.
One of the real differences in organic meat is animal welfare. Our animals have more space, more diversity in their food, they are slower growing and have very little stress, so they are healthy.
When you slaughter poultry you use a lot of water and we purify it through a reed bed system. The water at the end is better than when it came out of the ground because it doesn’t contain huge amounts of nitrogen that has been put into the land by the farmers around us.
We need to get much better at stretching the meals with a bird. We sell bags of bones for soup – people can’t get enough of them. The stock from a heritage turkey is superb because the quality of the bones is stronger and it makes for more flavour.
My garden is the most productive bit of the farm. We can produce about 10 tons of food off an acre of land whereas you produce 3-5 tons off a one-acre wheat field. Plus, if you eat vegetables in season they are at their optimal nutritional quality. They cook beautifully and taste wonderful. The cold weather sets up the sugars in root vegetables and this is what makes them so tasty. It doesn’t matter if you are in the countryside or the city, you can grow something to eat. I’d like to see land around council estates – and there’s a lot of it – start producing vegetables.
The most magical time we spend together as a family in the whole year is preparing the food for Christmas. People will bend over backwards to get the best ingredients for this festival. They do not want to open tins; they want to do something together.
We believe in the Slow Food movement with its cry for ‘good, clean and fair’. It supports local growers and it promotes eating together. Its founder, Carlo Petrini, says we’re all co-producers, we’re all part of the system. That’s why the writer and conservationist Wendell Berry says, ‘Eating is an agricultural act.’
I feel passionately that if you support your local community and your local farmers and growers, your farmers’ market and local shops, it is very good for your self-esteem; you can see you are making a difference.
Buying a Sheepdrove Turkey
Christmas turkeys, hampers and more
are available from the Sheepdrove Shop on the web, or the two family butchers shops at London and Bristol. Our attentive staff will also gladly take your order on the phone – please call 01488 674727
Sheepdrove Organic Farm are proud to announce new, quick shop pages! Our fantastic Quick Shop is fast becoming a favourite. It’s a great way to order your Christmas Turkey early with no trouble at all.
Head to the Quick Shop page for faster-than-ever links to all these tasty, top quality products:
Sheepdrove Organic Farm has written before about the huge problem of antibiotics in farming. We avoid them, as an organic farm. Our customers appreciate this, as do many food experts.
If you were worried about MRSA consider this – industrial food production is making things worse. Researchers are finding mulit-resistant bacteria in all sorts of places, and it is linked with the over-use of antibiotics in farm animal care.
New government figures show approximately 64% of all farm antibiotic use is in pigs, 32% in poultry, 3% in cattle, 1% in fish and less than 0.5% in sheep. [10] This demonstrates the huge reliance of the intensive pig and poultry industries on antibiotics. Grazing animals like cattle and sheep, on the other hand, are generally farmed less intensively, with greater access to the outdoors. As a result, they develop fewer diseases and do not need as many antibiotics. But some modern farms feed antibiotics as a matter of course – not just to cure an illness, which is the intended purpose.
The Soil Association has just made a press release about it. Richard Young, Soil Association policy adviser, said:
“We estimate that a move to less intensive, more health-oriented livestock farming, could reduce farm antibiotic use by up to 75%. This would help to safeguard the future effectiveness of critically important drugs, and over the coming years, save countless human lives.
“The Government needs to get a grip on the situation quickly. Despite a warning from the House of Lords in 1998 on the veterinary use of fluoroquinolones and the increasing concern of the WHO and European regulators more recently, it has taken no effective action, and the use of these life-saving drugs is now increasing exponentially, year after year.
“We accept there are occasions when these antibiotics should legitimately be used on farms to prevent the death or suffering of large mammals like cattle and pigs. But it is quite clear that through ignorance of the long-term consequences, many vets and farmers are still choosing them just because they are modern medicines, when for most conditions there are equally effective alternatives.”
Government figures just published show another big jump in the veterinary use of two of the most important classes of antibiotics in human medicine. This is the sixth time in the last seven years that both fluoroquinolone and cephalosporin use has increased. In comparison with 2001, fluoroquinolone use in 2007 is up by 48% and cephalosporin use up by 138%. This despite large falls in livestock numbers over the same period. Since 2001 [4] pig numbers have fallen by 17%, poultry by 7%, cattle by 3% and sheep by 8%. [5]
Click here for the full press release and free downloads. (source: Soil Association)
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